The first day of the Symbian Smartphone Show brought a raft of announcements. Here is my day one roundup and commentary on the new.
It seems there was hardly time to digest one announcement before another came flying out of the Symbian Smartphone Show.
There were three announcements providing the strongest indicators of future developments in the Symbian ecosystem, the change in ownership at UIQ, the release of new phones from Samsung, and the new technology in Symbian OS v9.5.
I suspect you are wondering why I've not included the announcement of the touch UI on S60. Two reasons, firstly this news has been leaking out since at least the S60 Summit back in May, so in many ways its not real news, even if the details are. Secondly, S60 has always been touchscreen capable; the devices have just not used this type of screen.
OK, so the purchase of a stake in UIQ by Motorola. The big piece of this story is that it is Motorola Inc. that has made the purchase. When Motorola was a shareholder in Symbian it was actually the European part of the company which owned the shares, not the US parent. This time it looks like a full corporate buy-in, not just a regional interest. Given that Motorola has made much of its Linux strategy this move gives huge weight to Nigel Clifford's comments that Symbian is seen less and less of Linux in the space Symbian operates - the mid to high end.
One thing is clear, expect to see much more activity from UIQ as it starts to implement a strategy to claw back its market share and go after the top spot occupied by S60.
With Samsung it is a similar story. After flirting with Symbian and S60 for a number of years the company seems to have jumped in with both feet. While five devices is still small compared to Nokia's lineup, Samsung has almost doubled the number of S60 devices with built in GPS capability. There are S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 devices on the way from Samsung too. A serious commitment to S60 from two of the top phone manufacturers is only likely to see other follow.
The new technologies announced for Symbian OS v9.5, ScreenPlay and FreeWay give a strong insight into how Symbian OS devices will be evolving over the remainder of this decade: Larger screens, faster networks, and generally more PC like performance and capabilities. One of the potential issues raised about Symbian OS is that, unlike some of its competitors (read Windows Mobile and Linux here) there is no desktop version of the software. I think it is safe to say that Symbian OS will be addressing this issue by blurring the lines between the PC and smartphone over the next few years.
ScreenPlay also has a good developer message; the addition of the OpenVG APIs and update of OpenGL ES. However, the updated version of Symbian Signed is also welcome news (although it will not be news to most developers, as the changes have been well previewed and discussed on the Symbian Developer Network forums for a month two now.) The ability to gain Symbian Signed on a whole raft of application almost instantly will be a huge benefit to developers, who have been suffering from the inevitable delays, costs, and frustrations of having to send their applications away for signing. In other developer news SYSOPENDIGIA announce that their unit testing tools would be available for Carbide.c++ later this year and Coverity has expanded support for Symbian C++.
On the applications front there is clearly an interesting battle emerging between Quickoffice and DataViz, both announcing the "first" support for Office 2007 documents, although on different platforms, S60 and UIQ respectively. Both are excellent document editing applications, but it is interesting to see the possibility of divergence in the office solutions used in S60 and UIQ. This would make some sense, particularly in light of the new more aggressive ambitions shown by UIQ. However, both DataViz and Quickoffice are likely to remain supporters of both platforms for the foreseeable future. It will be interesting to see if Quickoffice's broader approach, as shown by its announcement with SoonR, gives the company an edge by making its overall offering much more integrated with the PC "office" world.
Another resample of "convergent innovation" saw two new Calendar style application announced by companies who are literally poles apart; Dreamlife from Australian developer Dreamspring and Handy Calendar from Epocware. Overall, and no disrespect to Epocware's excellent applications, Dreamlife looks the more interesting of the two because it is part of a broader strategy being implemented by Dreamspring to bring "life management" to the smartphone.
Email also remains a hot topic with hot Cordato and emoze expanding their offerings.
In other announcements, a number of companies showed an increasing commitment to Symbian OS with native C++ implementation of products that have either been around as Java implementations or simply not available on Symbian OS, these include Google Maps, Social.FM, Handmark, CoPilot, and StyleTap. StyleTap is an interesting technology that more than doubles the number of applications available on Symbian OS phones by allowing these devices to run applications written for Palm. Given Palm's woes it may be a somewhat late entry for this product, but there is no denying that there is a wealth of good Palm application out there that do not yet have a Symbian OS equivalent.
There are still several interesting announcements to come from the second day of the Smartphone Show, so remember to check out SymbianOne's dedicated news section and look out for a final roundup tomorrow.
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