Is Symbian looking beyond handsets?

By Andrew Till
As the Symbian Foundation gets up and running and ready for the first releases of handsets based on its first release, there are signs that the Foundation may expand its horizons to focus on new market opportunities.
In this week’s BusinessWeek David Wood is quoted as saying "There's a lot of interest in netbooks," & "I've never been as busy and rushed off my feet in my entire life. We are seeing a lot of early experimentation." Given Symbians broad support for most of the world’s favorite application processors it would make a lot of sense for them to look at new market opportunities such as mobile information devices, GPS navigation solutions and web tablets. This would also make a lot of sense given the recent announcements about Android based netbooks and Microsoft’s long standing strength in embedded consumer electronics market with WinCE.

Exciting times ahead.

Platform strategy revisited

By Dr. Roger Hampel
Just recently, I got myself a new phone. It has plenty of new features while some of the ones already present in my old phone have been greatly enhanced. Nevertheless, it took me only a few minutes to get accustomed to it. Why so? It’s because the new phone is based on the same platform as the old one.

The mobile phone industry has seen the creation of a number of platforms. There are closed ones, created and used by a single OEM to leverage across multiple products and product lines (e.g. Nokia Series 40, Blackberry). Then, there are the ones available for licensing by other OEMs (e.g. Palm, BREW, Windows Mobile), the sort of half-open ones. And, just recently, open source platforms have arrived, available royalty-free to every OEM supporting the ecosystem around them (e.g. Android, Symbian).

The automotive infotainment market is still in the process of creating and establishing infotainment platforms. Microsoft Auto has been around for a while and was recently revamped. It can be experienced in Fiat’s Blue&Me as well as Ford SYNC systems. The GENIVI alliance was officially launched at this year’s CeBIT trade show, aiming to develop an open source IVI platform. And RTOS provider QNX just recently has also launched their QNX CAR program (Connected Automotive Reference), providing a reference platform for rapid prototyping and development of IVI systems.

So what to expect as a user? Expect shorter development cycles for IVI systems and improved compatibility and interoperability with mobile devices such as phones, media players, headsets, etc. Expect downloadable system and feature upgrades, application and content stores for automotive infotainment and improved user experience. Expect the car to become the ultimate phone accessory!

Happy Easter

By Magnus Ingelsten
Now innovations are born. In economic downturns many new ideas are spurred. These are the times when people must be creative and go the extra mile to become more competitive and unique. We heard Al Gore at CTIA when he praised the momentum and direction of the mobile market: "Your industry is growing and providing new applications, products and services," he said. "It's amazing to think how quickly this revolution has occurred and how rapidly it's still growing."

I just bought an excellent Netbook with total wireless connectivity providing 3G, Wlan and Bluetooth for the price of a low -end feature phone or half the price of a high end smartphone. Imagine how we now can be totally wireless and mobile. My car updates its software while I am driving. I swipe my credit card in the smartcard slot under the dashboard on the offer to upgrade with an additional 12 horsepower because the developers came up with smart ways to control the engine management system. I could agree to buy a new GPS map update and got a notice from the GPS system, making me aware the my daughter is waiting at the bus stop , so I turn in to pick her up. Then the shopping list turns up on my in car display.. wife is online obviously...
Is this possible ? Of course it is and I am sure it is under development by our excellent engineers as we speak.
Oh, and my car display writes out a message from the nearby supermarket , that easter eggs are at half price. So happy easter!

CTIA it´s all about speed

By Andrew Till
In between the wall to wall meetings I managed to grab a quiet half an hour to walk the halls of this years CTIA in Las Vegas. As with other trade shows attendance was down (a much maligned topic of conversation of every taxi trip I took but I for one will not complain at being able to zip around Las Vegas from the strip to the convention centre in less than 10 minutes) but there were some interesting insights to be gained about the key themes in the market.
The most notable was the push for ever faster Mobile Broadband technologies. LTE was a clear focus of the show with Motorola and Siemens both very visible in pushing their credentials in the infrastructure space. Verizon used the show to announce its first round deployment partners for LTE with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson both being selected. Aside from this there banners and positioning statements galore focused on the mobile broadband opportunity.
Net Applications latest March data, also released during the show, perhaps explains why the focus on mobile broadband is so strong. Not only are mobile users surfing more the competition between platforms is increasing with Android based devices growing strongly as a % of the overall mobile browsing user base and shaping us as a key competitor to the iPhone in the US market. This seems to show that clearly consumers we willing to keep spending on mobile internet services even in these credit crunched times. Of course I will refrain from noting the irony of having mobile broadband being heavily push in a city that seems to be many base stations short in the network coverage stakes!
And the focus is not restricted to the US market alone. Perhaps one of the most interesting announcements was Samsung’s new Netbook with integrated WiMax for the Russian market. The NC10 looks like a very interesting proposition with a 10inch display, Windows XP Home edition and a battery life of up 9 hours on a single charge.
So I for one am already looking forward to next years show and being able to test out those 4G speeds.

The 6th sense

By Andrew Till
For a glimpse of what maybe the future of wearable technology take a look at this video of Pattie Maes at the TED conference recently. The demo developed in Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, by her student Pranav Mistry, was the coolest show-off at TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that beams interactive information at a surface in front of the user. I'm sure some of these concepts will be making their way in to new consumer electronics devices in the not too distant future. I think the world is ready for this. But naturally a very challenging development project to get both the information access and the UI to make it all usable. It is internet convergence at it's peak! At maximum 350 USD, it is on my list of wanted geek stuff!

Does Apple open up?

By Andrew Till
This weeks announcement by Apple of its iPhone 3.0 software suggest that the company maybe moving towards a more open future. At the core of the announcement was 1000 new APIs to be made available to developers suggesting that Apple is opening up a lot more of the operating system moving forwards. Included in these will be new accessory control APIs enabling hardware vendors to create companion applications for the iPhone. Apple also announced 100 new features which will be part of the release including stereo Bluetooth support and peer to peer connectivity over WiFi and Bluetooth. Looking at these new APIs combined with the new built in feature set Apple is enabling a developers to create a new bread of compelling mobile applications and peripheral solutions to support the iPhone and iPod Touch range. The challenge is now on to see how the other key platform providers respond.

Oh and perhaps the most significant part of the announcement - good old copy and paste will also be part of the 3.0 release!

3U mantra for Smart phones

By Chandrashekar Challagonda:
I was walking through the MWC-2009 halls observing all the booths and trying to understand how everyone tries to promote their product or service. After being around for 4 days I figured that most of those who are exhibiting and visiting are hungry for "Uniqueness". Well again, if we relate this to human evolution, it has been observed that human beings are quite "Unique" compared to other living beings. We are unique in every manner on this earth. High intelligence: This is unique for human beings. It’s in basic human nature to be instinctively unique. My cousin who is a fashion designer said to me once "Being fashionable is nothing but being unique". I kind of agree with her statement, because the only way to get noticed and draw more attention is by being unique from the crowd. If I apply this analogy to smart phones, everyone is trying to make their product unique. The way they are doing it is by having a killer feature or Unique UI. So it’s all about creating a phone which is unique. After all "Uniqueness is publicity by itself".

After first thinking about "U", I kind of drew my attention to another "U", which is "Usability". We are of course attracted towards the Uniqueness, but what is the use of it, if we can not use it. Usability is nothing but how good and comfortable the User Experience is. There are lots of technologies in the world which are excellent and unique who just died because of poor usability. Usability has always stayed top of my list for any feature or technology. This is the 2nd level of requirement to make the product more promoting. "Uniqueness" can turn heads, but to keep and retain the attention of that turned head; it needs to have the "Usability".

Sometimes I get nostalgic and remember the day when I first saw a phone, which weighed about 2-3kgs, was connected by a wire to some plug in the house and where you needed to hold a big door handle kind of speaker and mike near to your face and to speak. I was very happy when my father could hear me and I could hear him, hundreds of kilometers away from me. But now it’s totally different, phones are wireless and mobile and do more than the old phones used to do. To be more precise voice communication is only a 1% of the full phone features nowadays with lot of features and functionalities "Unified" in it. Now this is the 3rd "U" mantra “Unification”. Smart phone users are demanding more and more functionality and features to be unified in the smart phone. I personally would like to have a unified access to all my office and personal mails, applications which I use daily and paying bills through my smart phone. This unification of features and functionality is happening very aggressively in the APAC market, more so than in rest of the world. Smart phones are more versatile than any other electronic gadget when it comes to unification.

So these Uniqueness, Usability and Unification are the 3 key properties which are the success factors for the smart phones. The more extensively these properties are provided in smart phones the broader the market segment it will cover.