In spite of the many predictions by numerous market experts and analysts that Symbian OS will eventually fade in popularity, so far the actual state of things looks quite the other way round: all the competitive solutions utterly fail to look competitive enough against the background of what Symbian has to offer its users - with no exception even for Windows mobile which also doesn’t produce an impression of a decent rival to Symbian. None of the top smartphone manufacturers ever regarded WM as their priority firmware implemented in a majority of products, and even the Motorola and Samsung corporations limited their use of WM to a number of models purely of pure strategic concerns since there’s a certain percentage of customers with a personal taste for the habitual Microsoft interface on which WM is based. Trying to cover as much market as possible, these companies use both operating systems in their products to be able to cater to any taste. However WM still seems to be no more than just a complementary software staying as long as the two companies haven’t finally decided on a universal operating system for further exclusive use in future models. Motorola engineers also put a lot of efforts into developing an alternative Linux-based mobile operating system as part of their forward-looking product development strategy while Samsung is still balancing between the versatile Symbian and more traditional-looking WM trying to find profit in well-planned exploiting of multiple existing software platforms licensed from their respective creators. Another aggravating factor is that WM-based devices themselves often fail to match their Symbian-based counterparts in ‘user friendliness’ including a somewhat old-fashioned and not actually too useable interface, real-life specifications that aren’t up to the ones stated by the manufacturer, and poor realization of some of the features. The very sound of ‘Windows’ doesn’t help marketing much as well, since the brand has eventually gotten a long-running reputation of offering more requirements than advantages and taking too much unnecessary user time and actions to complete even the simplest tasks.

doesn’t help Symbian being godlike, in fact it’s not that way at all and its audience is also limited (yet to a very large number of loyal customers) and there are tendencies found with certain companies to increase the number of WM-based products in their portfolio. There has been a lot of rumors circulating around the SonyEricsson alleged intention to switching to WM in few of their upcoming models in 2008, meaning that Symbian could possibly lose a significant part of its audience of people who care for product brand more than for the brand of the software platform it uses. On the other hand we should consider the fact that SonyEricsson are a joint-owner company of the UIQ platform developed from Symbian so it can hardly be so that SonyEricsson are regarding WM as a full-fledged alternative rather than a complementary measure to boost their sales counting on people who stick to Windows Mobile OS, maybe that’ll help SE to draw some of the customers who don’t have any developed brand preferences from the side of other brands implementing WM in their products. Large sums of money are being invested by the company into the development of UIQ, just a few days ago nine new members joined the UIQ Alliance including the ARM and Epocware companies.

The further development of this market sector can be seriously implemented by the approaching release of S60-based devices supporting the touchscreen technology during 2008. Nokia, the engine and edge of the S60 and Symbian technology, decided to take further steps towards developing a full-blown touchscreen interface allowing user to control every aspect of their smartphone with a single movement of the finger (literally!), putting the styluses aside. Being able to control the device single-handedly is one of the priority features that the developers are going to introduced in the new generation of devices. This will give the company a chance to keep in time with the competing platform since this kind of UI, though already implemented in the latest products by HTC (think TouchFlo) is still too immature to form a strong opposition. The smooth transition to the high-definition CVGA screens is another marketing initiative introduced by some of the manufacturers of WM-based devices, while analogous Symbian solutions are still in development. Both platform are in a state of rapid development and are expected to match each other in functionality and usability by the time of release, that’s when such factors as brand, price, design and minor details in implementation come into play.

On the one hand, the Symbian SmartphoneShow suggests a consumer-oriented show judging by the very title of it; it’s always useful even for a casual customer to have a peek at the latest technologies waiting to find implementation and have a touch of the announced but still unreleased products which stand on the brink of market entry. On the other, the expo attracts numerous lesser companies playing a supportive part on the mobile market by developing complementary solutions for popular mobile platform. These participants are usually looking for contracts and trying to draw attention of ‘bigger buddies’ to their developments. SymbianExpo also offers a multitude of seminars for developers, investors and analysts which is quite habitual for a modern core exhibition of such scale aimed both at amateurs and professionals.

Technologies

Among the numerous announcements and novelties presented at SymbianExpo this year, the most fascinating piece of news was the announced S60 touchscreen-based user interface with full support for accelerometers and orientation sensors. A back compatibility with older applications was stated as well. A list of even newer technologies soon to be supported by the platform was also made public.

Screenplay is the new graphics engine for Symbian OS developed for devices sporting newer user interface designs based off new methods of screen output enriched with additional visual effects like image overlapping and transparency.

FreeWay is the new IP architecture created for Symbian OS allowing for high-speed data transfer of various data inlcuding multimedia files and voice signal over VoIP. In addition to OS-level support for such technologies as Wi-Max and Super3G, FreeWays ensures easy and fault-proof switching between different types of networks without any need to release any of the currently established connections. This technology is integrated on the OS level so it’s compatible with any application created for Symbian, such as web browsers, email clients and so on.

These two technologies make up a weighty addon to the the earlier announced SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) support which provides for a significant perfromance boost by using a multiple-processor architecture. The computing power is distributed ‘on demand’, which saves battery life.

Smartphones

Let’s move to the new device then and have a look at the latest handsets shown at the exhibition. A series of very intriguing smartphones were announced by Samsung, displaying three models targeted at three different market sectors. SonyEricsson have disappointed the anticipant public by moving the announce of their new UIQ-based device to a later date, so it didn’t show up at the expo.

The Samsung company can hardly be called a novice at designing Symbian smartphones, the first samples of such products were the D720 and D730 models which already were out two years ago. Due to a variety of reasons, these products had little popularity on the mass market, primarily because of their delayed release so they weren’t able to keep in time with the latest technologies and offerings of that day. Hiding away for more than a year, Samsung struck back at Symbian Expo 2006 with their new smartphone Samsung i520 - a very modern device exploiting all the advantages of the latest version (by that time) of Symbian OS. Though another major gap between the announce and market entry dates was a blow on the device’s popularity and sales. This was followed by a series of announced new Symbian models by Samsung distributed in an orderly fashion so that every market is covered.

Samsung i400 is a fashion slider (according to the manufacturer’s classification), a compact handset keeping the spirit of the G600 series. An average functionality offered at a popular price features Russia as its starting market though it’s going to enjoy a certain success worldwide.

Samsung i450 is the first smartphone representing the company’s Ultra Music line of music phones. The product sports a double slider design (much like Nokia N95) and sports a variety of neat features like the sensor used as a control element for the mp3 player which reacts to folding and unfolding the slider.

Samsung i560 is another fashion smartphone, the difference consists in boosted specs as compared to i400 and additional features like the integrated GPS module and a 3 Mpix camera.

Samsung i550 is a navigator with very appealing specs, the only flaw being a lack of Wi-Fi. A detailed review of that device is already published on our site.

A range of brand accessories for the upcoming products were presented as well, including a wireless stereo headset, a wire acoustic system and a variety of miscellaneous bluetooth headsets.

The showcase of Motorola company was entirely devoted to the launch of the long-suffering kick-slider RIZR Z8. The product enjoys a huge deal of attention from its developers, a holding of 50% UIQ shares was bought by the company from SonyEricsson. The latter are planning to introduce a whole new series of mobile devices based off Symbian UIQ, it’s important to note that the Z8 and Z10 lack the touchscreen unlike the rest of UIQ devices. The Ti OMAP 2420 CPU allows for HQ video recording and playback never seen before on a mobile platform, being the device’s strongest sales point.

The SonyEricsson showcase was mostly remarkable for their W960i model which came to replace the good old W950i. Storage beefed up to 8 Gb and a 3,2 Mpix camera are the main differences of the novelty as compared to the precursor.

As usual, the Japanese developers presented quite a few new developments, each sporting an exclusive eyecandy feature. For instance, the D704 model has an almost living mushroom inhabiting the desktop - a mixture of a screensaver mascot and a Tamagochi pet, which looks rather natural than weird for a device originating from a country where such things as Tamagochi cemeteries exist; the unremarkable folder suddenly displays a host of flying butterflies all over the front panel when you close it.

Software

Quite traditionally for SymbianExpo, the Symbian software developers occupied the majority of showcases. The number of developer companies designing applications for this platform is growing like a snowball as well as new development tools and books on Symbian coding emerge. The tendency is openly supported by the Symbian company - a total of 45 universities are known to give instruction on developing Symbian applications and its specifics.

The mobile TV technologies was only featured at a few showcases, which nevertheless doesn’t stand for a decline in the industry, rather signifying the fact that most major manufacturers have made final decisions on the hardware implementation of this service in their products as well as appropriate features of the user interface.

The GPS navigation was in the spotlight since this trend in mobile functionality development is one of the priority aspects - we are now witnessing the birth of a full-fledged, worldwide market of GPS devices.

A casual consumer might want to look at the announce of the Google Maps application adapted to the Symbian platform - you are asked to specify an address or an area and then you instantly get a detailed map displayed right on the screen of your smartphone. The application is available for downloading at google.com/gmm

SysOpenDigia announced a couple of brand new applications including Corporate Phonebook (a program devoted to keeping an expanded and unified contact book) and a remote control software for smartphones utilizing the Symbian platform, UIQ and S60 alike.

At their sensation-rich showcase, the PowerVR Insider program participants presented among other things some neat samples of graphics accelerator implementation in a number of mobile devices.

Summing up the facts, the exhibition was rich in content and especially interesting to people keen on the latest technological developments on the mobile market and their real-life implementation, the most remarkable announce being the upcoming update of the S60 platform which will let the manufacturers develop S60 devices supplied with a touchscreen.

Author: Boris Nikiforov

smape.com

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