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As 2009 comes to an end, the Symbian Foundation is looking ahead for ways to ensure that the Symbian mobile platform will remain the most popular smartphone platform and will continue to win developer mind share.
In a Dec. 24 post about this, Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, called out the “incredible flexibility, robustness and adaptability” of the Symbian OS as key factors for its success. Added Williams: “We enjoy better multitasking capability [and] better power management, security and scale of market than any mobile platform out there. It is clear that we have a unique offering and an OS architected for mobile from Day 1, and poised to continue to appeal to the marketplace at a tremendous scale.”
Moreover, Williams said in that post:
““From 2010 onwards Symbian-powered smartphones will continue to bring the web to people who cannot afford a PC and who need to be on the move as a part of their lifestyle, perhaps because they might be farmers in a rural area of the India sub-continent, or small business owners in a remote area of China. We will be directly assisting them in linking them into a global economy, and we will be giving them computing power and access to essential applications and services in finance, payments, healthcare, transport, entertainment … and so on.”“
However, where Williams sees a rosy current and future situation for the Symbian platform, one reader of his post saw things a bit differently.
In a Dec. 25 response commenting on Williams’ post, a reader identified as PP said:
““I’m sorry, I guess Christmas is bringing out the Scrooge in me, but on what planet does Symbian “enjoy better multitasking capability […] than any mobile platform out there”? The one with the rose-tinted vistas on which Symbian represents the pinnacle of single-handed “focus UI” evolution I suppose. On power management, security, and scale of market you could at least muster a bit of a wine-fueled post-turkey debate…”I don’t like to nitpick at this time of year, but it betrays a certain uninformed complacency on the technical side that isn’t particularly healthy. When Symbian sets its stall out against Android and Google these days, it’s exclusively about how open Symbian is and how nefarious Google’s intentions are (and hell, I don’t want to live in Google’s ad-laced dystopian future either). On the technical/feature side, though, we just get assertion-without-proof of leadership juxtaposed with an ‘Ideas’ site which is for the most part just a shopping list of features already present on other platforms. Frustrating. Let’s hear an engineering argument, just for once!”“
Expanding on his call for an engineering discussion of the issues, PP said he “called out multitasking just because it’s so blatantly incorrect today. Versus iPhone? Sure. Versus Android, Maemo or WebOS? Hardly. You could point to Symbian/Nokia’s hugely expensive investment in three-plane architectures under the hood, but (a) they’ve not shipped yet, and (b) they’ve never been proven to take Symbian beyond the performance and responsiveness achievable through more pragmatic means on top of Linux anyway.”
And PP questioned Symbian’s ability to back up Williams’ claims, saying:
““Now of course if you *could* concretely demonstrate Symbian’s superiority over current-generation Linux-based mobile operating systems in this, or indeed in any area where Symbian traditionally held an advantage before the hordes descended to improve mobile Linux (e.g. power management, ROM/RAM footprint), then that would be a blog post that would get people’s attention…”“
Williams Defends Symbian
Williams responded to these and other points, saying, “I am not sure where any one who knows how operating systems work-, task- and memory-manage gets the idea that there is a more capable or advanced system in mobile than Symbian. This is especially true when you look at a trifecta of hardware capability including a low-level application processor, a configuration with multiple RF [radio frequency] frequency capabilities, a high-end image encoding and decoding capability, and something that needs a day or two’s worth of battery life.”
Meanwhile, adding to the bold claims he made in his original post, Williams said:
““We can build on this core capability faster than others. Improvements to and a focus on usability by manufacturers, and broadening our hardware configuration support base will help us show any of the naysayers that this software platform has long legs. We are poised to obtain these gains through contributions, and a healthy ecosystem of partner companies and individuals. 2010 and 2011 will be very interesting in this way. Higher-end, high-volume products will not come out on any other platform.”“
Williams also said Nokia’s endorsement of Symbian gives the platform a solid foundation for its role as being the “communications platform for the masses.”
In other mobile development news, Mike Kirkup, director of developer relations at Research In Motion, in a blog post discussed many of the high points of RIM’s BlackBerry developer program for 2009, including:
“??Ç Launch of the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog and technical webcast series! Over 200,000 Registered BlackBerry developers.??Ç Doubled the size of the developer community over the past year with substantial international growth.??Ç Launch of BlackBerry App World with follow up releases including a new client and a web store.??Ç Launch of the Developer Issue Tracker providing an open environment for developers to submit issues and feature requests tracked against Research In Motion’s internal development queue. An industry first!??Ç Best BlackBerry developer event ever with the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference.??Ç BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge ends in a dramatic Final 16 showdown live at the BlackBerry Developer Conference and awards more than US $250,000 in prizes.??Ç Revamp of the BlackBerry Developer Zone making it easier to find what you are looking for, download tools and get started developing.“