LONDON—Symbian is the leading developer of smart phone operating systems and is intent on keeping its lead. A key part of maintaining that lead falls under the purview of David Wood, executive vice president of research at the company, based here.
Wood sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft at the Symbian Smartphone Show here to discuss his role and some of Symbians strategies.
You guys recently, at the end of August, opened an R&D site in Beijing. Whats the focus of that? What do you expect to gain from that?
Well, its a place where there are lots of bright software engineers, and we have a need to grow our software engineering capacity. We have a large team in the UK; we have a large team in Bangalore; and we wanted to grow elsewhere. So we looked around the world and we thought Beijing was a place with lots and lots of bright people.
Its also close to various partners of ours. We have a close relationship with China Mobile already. And its gone very well. Weve also already signed up six different universities in China to our Symbian Academy.
What to you think you need to do to make the Symbian OS or the overall platform more amenable to the enterprise?
We think weve got a pretty good enterprise story, if you look at. For example, some of the Nokia phones—like the E61. It does the most important enterprise app, which is corporate e-mail. Ive actually got the BlackBerry client on mine. I have BlackBerry messages and this also uses the BlackBerry services to synchronize my calendar. So that is in some ways the most important corporate application.
Although you can argue that maybe theres one thats more important, which is unifying voice. By unifying voice I mean that I dont have one number for this phone and another number for my desk phone, but that you can have mobile phones as an integral part of an enterprise PBX. So when somebody rings my desk phone it automatically rings up on here. And it automatically chooses the least-cost routing. And in-house were trialing a solution from Avaya.
So there are two enterprise services that were doing well. Another enterprise application is access to corporate wikis or corporate intranets. And as the browsers on these devices get better and better, then suddenly you dont always need to write new applications. You can just go point to point with these devices.
So when Im traveling I often go onto our corporate research wiki through a secure interface and I can see what they are doing and I can also post comments there.
I noticed that the description of your keynote said you plan to talk about enhancing scalability in the converged device space, what do you mean by that?
Scalability means that we work with the very high-end phones, the ones that have oodles and oodles of hardware in them—a bit like the Apple iPhone, right down to… Lets use the right term here, we shouldnt call them inexpensive phones, but the mainstream phones—the phones that ordinary people would use; phones that can be bought much more cheaply.
Click here to read more about Symbian smart phone features.
We have a software system that will automatically take advantage of the graphics processing unit if there is one. Or a hardware accelerator if there is one. But if there isnt one well still give good results.
So, hypothetically, if Google were to come out with a phone platform do you see you guys supporting it?
Well, if this is all, as you say, hypothetical, we would say Google, like BlackBerry, or RIM [Research in Motion],, would like to have their services running very well on Symbian phones. So BlackBerry, as an alternative phone system with devices that are competitive to ours because they have a different operating system… They also want their services to run on as many Symbian smart phones as possible. So I think it will be the same with Google.
If they do, hypothetically, have their own operating system they will still want their services to run excellently well on Symbian phones. And I know it. Just today they made an announcement that theres a native version of Google Maps on the Symbian OS.
So Google is showing a commitment. Thats an example of Google bringing their services on these phones. Why do they want them on these phones? Well, typically people who buy smart phones use data services more fully.
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Whats different about developing applications for the mobile space as opposed to the enterprise space, other than things like screen size? And do you see the two worlds converging?
Well, screen size is one thing. What were trying to do is to minimize the differences, because we want to take the pain out of development.
Now in reality you cant hide all the differences for applications that want to do really tough things. For an application that is not doing anything so tough, you could get by on more standard interfaces.
So one thing weve done recently is weve introduced something called PIPS [a recursive acronym for: PIPS is Posix on Symbian] and it provides a Posix environment, so people who have written their application in standard C will be able to get that running fairly quickly on Symbian phones.
That hides some of the differences. But then when it comes to the UI, the UI typically will need to be tailored to the small screen. And if theres computational intensity, people will have to think hard because you dont want to drain the battery. So thats where we will give plenty of advice. And there are tools to alert people to the fact that they are running in very tight loops, or things you get away with on the desktop but dont get away with on mobile.
Another thing were doing is were promoting support for scripting languages, such as Python. And there have been some very interesting results from generalists, or non-technical people who within a week they can build an application using Python on mobile phones.
Any reason why youre doing Python and not Ruby or PHP?
Well, were doing Ruby as well. And when I say we, its not Symbian thats doing it. But Symbian is enabling other people to do this. And to an extent its a matter of choice. Python got there first, but there are ports of Ruby. Ive got a Ruby virtual machine running on my phone here, which has just been done. Its a port of Ruby 1.9, which has a different multithreaded infrastructure and is coming out around Christmas. And some people have got a hold of this and theyve done a port onto Symbian OS.
To an extent, I would say let 1,000 flowers bloom. It depends on what people are familiar with.
Thats why I say we want to take away the differences from mobile programming. So if theyre used to programming in Ruby then they can get Ruby on their phone.
Your title is EVP of research. How far ahead do you look?
Actually, what I do in research is slightly more complicated. Its not necessarily far ahead; its anything outside our current agreed scope. So its my job to make sure the management team at Symbian doesnt wake up one morning and say oh my goodness we should have seen this coming. Ive got to anticipate predictable surprises.
If its an unpredictable surprise, thats another story. But, most of the time is spent on things we should have seen. And not only that we should have seen, but that we should prioritize to do something about them and then mobilize to do something about them. So its my job to raise a flag and say either this is something bad or this is a good opportunity.
What are you raising a flag about right now?
Scripting. Thats one reason Im interested in scripting environments. Thats something Ive pushed hard.
What does your group do regarding the concept of usability?
Because our phones have more and more technology, it always gets in each others way. So if theres only one thing the phone can do then you have a nice, easy UI. But if there are a hundred things the phone can do, then how do you organize it? Thats a hard problem.
So one thing were doing is graphics. And graphics, can—especially if there are multiple layers of graphics—give the user more of a clue as to whats likely to be hidden away under the next level down.
So one of the big technologies weve announced at the show is ScreenPlay, which is support for something called graphics composition. Graphics composition is where different parts of the application and different parts of the software write in different layers and then the OS magically blends it together so that the right things are seen through.
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