Nick Jones

I spent several hours roaming around the London Symbian show SEE 2009 yesterday. SEE is a rather unfocussed event, the exhibitors range from companies selling mobile virtualisation and low level touch screen IP through testing tools all the way up to consultancies wanting to build high level applications. SEE really needs to decide whether it’s a show for handset manufacturers or software developers, at the moment it’s aiming at both audiences and not doing a good job for either. SEE was also a disappointingly small show, given that Symbian is the dominant smartphone OS by a large margin. There are more Apple engineers at Apple WWDC than attendees at SEE. So there’s still a lot of work to do. However, I had some interesting discussions about both Symbian and mobile development.

Immersion the haptics company, had a stand showing lots of handsets using their technology. One of the most interesting ideas we talked about was “pre-location haptics”. This is a technology for touch screens; as you slide your finger across the screen the haptic vibration changes to indicate when your finger is aligned over an active area such as a virtual key. So you get feedback before you press the key. I have a good feeling about this technology; or more precisely I hope that I will soon have a good feeling about it, once it starts emerging in handsets.

How sophisticated can Symbian become? Symbian gets a lot of bad press for not being competitive with iPhone, so I had several discussions about where Symbian could go in the future. There are two schools of thought here. The Symbian foundation view enthusiastically articulated by Lee Williams is that Symbian is a platform that can easily power winning high end devices to compete with iPhone. Lee points to handsets such as the SE Satio to illustrate that Symbian is evolving in this direction. The other side of this debate is illustrated by Nokia themselves who recently built a Maemo Linux handset, the N900. I believe that what drove this project was Nokia’s view that Symbian is held back by a lot of historical baggage plus the need to support a very wide range of handset capabilities and price points. Therefore it can’t provide the features and user experience needed at the very top end of the market where iPhone plays, so a new platform is needed to power the next generation of handsets.

My view is that both sides of this dispute are partly right, but the problem is the UI not the platform. The underlying Symbian platform is very powerful and can do pretty much anything, but it’s being held back by an unexciting user experience. I don’t believe the visual experience needed by future high-end handsets will be achievable with the graphics and CPU of a low-end smartphone. If Symbian split the user experience layers into high-end and mid-range variants it could be more competitive.