2010-11-11 Symbian^3

open source phone

Symbian

Symbian isn't what it used to be. It all started with the Psion organiser introduced in 1984. Back then, the operating system Psion had created was known as EPOC. When they introduced a 32-bit variant, the older operating system became known as the EPOC16 and the new one as EPOC32.
In 1998, Symbian Ltd was formed as joint venture between Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, and the name of the system changed; EPOC32 version 5 was followed by Symbian OS version 6.

Here is where it gets tricky: Symbian OS 9.5, released in 2007, is followed by Symbian^2; the name changed slightly, the OS postfix was dropped, and the version jumped down. This is confusing. The odd convention of attaching the version number to the Symbian name by putting a caret instead of space in between increases the textual difference between Symbian OS 9.5 and Symbian^2, but is most of all just remarkably and annoyingly odd.

Symbian^3

The real change between Symbian OS 9.5 and Symbian^2 isn't the name. The real change was the Symbian Foundation was formed with the goal to publish Symbian as open source. That was in 2008 and at the time Symbian released only part of the source code, because parts were still proprietary. Early in 2010, Symbian announced that it had replaced all propriety code with open source. This fully open source system is known as Symbian^3.

Today, Symbian^3 is the only fully open source smartphone operating system. Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone OS and Research In Motion (RIM)'s BlackBerry OS are all closed source. Contrary to public perception, Google's Android is largely, but not fully open source; it actually is a combination of open and closed source.

For starters, Android it comes with several closed-source applications. That may seem a minor issue, as the complete base Android system is open source anyway, but it is easy to understand that Symbian likes to highlight this difference. A bigger issue is that key low-level firmware for interfacing with the phone hardware is not open. These libraries are hardware-specific, but you do not have a complete phone operating system without those libraries.

manufacturers

There is another big difference between Android and Symbian^3, and it is not in Symbian's favour. There are already hundreds of Android phones on the market and in the pipeline. There are many Symbian devices on the market, but there are just a few Symbian^3 devices yet, most notably the Nokia N8.

It remains to be seen how many other manufacturers will offer Symbian phones, now that both Samsung and Sony Ericsson have decided to drop Symbian and focus on Android instead. Symbian has been restructured as a legal entity responsible for licensing, and Nokia is driving Symbian development on its own.

Symbian Exchange and Exposition

This week, the Symbian Foundation recently held its annual Symbian Exchange & Exposition (SEE) in Amsterdam. I attended SEE2010, and no one objected to my Palm organiser or Android phone. In fact, although quite a few attendees carried a brand new Symbian^3 phone, there were plenty of people using iPhones, BlackBerries and Android phones.

tracks

There were many concurrent sessions in different tracks. The event did not only have an application developer and business track, but a platform developer track as well, for companies and individuals looking to create their own Symbian devices or contribute to the Symbian open source project.
A lot of action wasn't in the presentation tracks but in the many Bird of a Feather (BoF) sessions, where developers met in small focussed groups.

Wild Ducks project

There was a lot of attention for the Wild Ducks project, a community effort to build a Symbian phone using off-the-shelf hardware. Their open hardware design can serve as a reference platform for anyone who wants to experiment with the Symbian software.

Symbian features

If you had to judge it by the noise that Apple made, you would think that FaceTime was a major industry innovation. Truth is, Symbian has featured video calling for years. Apple introduced multitasking as recently as their iPhone 4, while Symbian has had it for years. Symbian has voice dialing and excellent Bluetooth support - the Nokia N8 supports Bluetooth 3.0. Symbian supports has USB-To-Go, can stream HD video with 5-channel Dolby surround sound over HDMI, and features PictBridge for printing photos without requiring a cable.

Symbian's weakness is the user interface. It isn't bad, but it wasn't designed for touch screens. Symbian plans to offer a completely rewritten user interface in Symbian^4. On the one hand this is good news for developers, as it makes Symbian more competitive. On the other hand consumers may want not want to learn the old system when they know a new one will coming soon, but want avoid Symbian until the new user interface is in place.

Another weakness that there may be plenty of Symbian apps, but that there aren't as many apps for Symbian^3 as there are for Apple iOS and Google Android, at least not yet. One reason Symbian organises the annual SEE is to bring developers together and help them get their applications on the Symbian platform.

Symbian development

The main message to application developers, reiterated in several sessions, is that they should be using Qt. Qt is an open-source cross-platform application and user-interface framework. It is widely used for Linux apps, but also in many well-known cross-platform applications such as AutoDesk, Adobe PhotoShop Album, the VLC Media Player and Skype. Qt was originally developed by Trolltech. In 2008, Nokia acquired Trolltech and renamed it Qt Development Frameworks. Qt is quite popular, so popular in fact that it has its own Qt Developer Days (QtDD).

This focus on Qt as the application framework is a recent decision. Developers can continue to use the native Symbian API, and may sometimes have to do so, but the Qt framework offers considerable advantages. When you see Symbian native API code and Qt code side by side, there is no denying that Qt is more expressive; the code is shorter and easier to understand. Another benefit is that it is cross-platform, and that Qt applications can run on both Symbian and MeeGo - Nokia's other platform. In fact, as long as they don't use phone-specific features, Qt applications can be run on Windows or Linux.

Developers are told to focus on Qt and HTML5. The marketing track told companies why they should be developing for Symbian. Nokia highlighted some statistics, such as that 260.000 Symbian devices are being sold each day, and how these users can be reached through the Ovi store.

exhibitors

Exhibitors in the main hall ranged from Rovio demonstrating their Angry Birds game on Nokia N8 phones, through consulting companies to the Wild Ducks projects. The odd one out was the World Film Collective, a non-profit that teaches film making using mobile phones to disadvantaged young people around the world. The brief explanation for their presence is that they do not only use mobile phones, but also that one of their trustees is John Forsyth, formerly a vice president at Symbian.

Nokia N8

Many of the booths at the exposition featured the Nokia N8 phone as part of their setup. I have not been able to use it long enough to get a good impression of how it handles in everyday use, but it certainly has some interesting features not found on most phones available today.

penta-band

Many of us carry around tri-band and quad-band phones, the Nokia N8 is a penta-band phone. It supports both GSM and WCDMA. Tri-band GSM phones are world phones already, but some regions are still using WCDMA and required special editions. There is just one Nokia N8 edition for the entire world.

Overall, the hardware specs are as you would expect from a high-end phone from a leading phone manufacturer: pretty nice. The Nokia N8 has a large 16K colours 16:9 650 x 360 AMOLED capacitive touch screen, an accelerometer, a compass, a proximity sensor and an ambient light detector in an aluminium body. The ambient light detector allow the phone to automatically adjust the display brightness.
It has 16 GB of internal memory, and 256 MB of on-board RAM, 135 MB of which is free to use by applications. The 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon Flash support video recording at 1280 x 720 and 25 frames per second.
It uses a micro-USB charger, supports Bluetooth 3.0 and accepts a microSD memory card slot.

radio

That you can listen to music playing on the N8 through a Bluetooth headset isn't very special, but the N8 offers another possibility. The N8 not only features an FM radio receiver, but also includes an FM radio transmitter; while other phones require a dock to play music over your stereo, the N8 simply broadcasts its signal to your radio. This is particularly handy for playing music over a car stereo; you can do so without having to spend money on some cable or dock.

Another remarkable feature is the HDMI connector and Dolby Digital Plus sound. One of the booths had the phone connected to home theatre amplifier, showing off its capabilities with trailers for current movies.

The demonstrations of the video output and radio transmitter were pretty convincing; I would like a radio transmitter in my next phone and wouldn't mind a HDMI connector. Of course, features like this drain the battery, and the Nokia N8 battery is only 1200 mAh while Nokia has larger batteries. What's more, the battery is not as replaceable as we are used from Nokia either; it isn't a matter of clicking on a spare battery anymore. The battery is replaceable, but you need to open the device with a torx screwdriver to do so. Nokia feels sure that the device is so power-efficient that you don't need a spare.

ready

The overall message of the conference was that Symbian^3 is ready to take on the competition. Symbian^3 is fully open source, there is a roadmap for the future, there are some great devices in the market, there is a new and easier way to develop apps, and there even is open hardware.

All that is true, but that does not stop me from having some doubts about that message, and that is not because the current Symbian logo is a horrendous. People recognise the Nokia brand, but few have heard about Symbian. Consumers do not really care about phone operating systems anyway, they care about such things as looks, price, features, easy of use and apps.

The problem is that the system may be great and the devices may be nice, but the competition has great brand recognition and is gaining marketshare. Moreover, fankids championing the Symbian competition aren't hard to find at all. We all know someone who swears that an Apple iPhone, an Android phone or their BlackBerry is the best phone you can get. I have yet to meet anyone who tells me that I should really get a Symbian phone.

Many consumers consider either the Apple iPhone 4 or Samsung's Android-based Galaxy S as the best device currently available and do not even consider the Nokia N8. Apple has reality-distorting marketing and an app for that, Android phones have great hardware for a low price. Symbian^3 phones have great features that almost no one knows about.

updates

2011-04-23: broken links

The Symbian blog and See2010 website are no more. Symbian press releases are gone too. The broken links have been removed.