Monday, September 8, 2008

Samsung Mobile Innovator - Yet another Symbian developer site

You might have heard of that Samsung has just kicked-off their new portal for mobile application developers. It's advertised as a great entry point for Symbian developers wishing to develop for Samsung devices based on this operating system. I'm not sure if other platforms will be covered by this site, too.


What I'm asking now, however, is if it's really worth increasing the fragmentation of Symbian development portals that are already present today. You know, I recall when I was involved in a cross-platform mobile development project and it really frustrated me that I had to check Forum Nokia, Sony Ericsson Developer World, uiq.com and Symbian DevNet to see what people said about nasty problems, their solutions and be sure that nothing has escaped my attention (well, I could never be sure about that).

I can see that Samsung might come out with such great features and services that will be very useful to the developer community in general. What I don't understand, though, is with Symbian Foundation (SF) starting early next year why doesn't SF kicks-off their own developer portal into which Samsung could integrate its own services. In an ideal world Symbian developers would just remember a single URL where they could find answers for all their questions. A powerful search engine could do magic, you know. Symbian Foundation gives a good opportunity to unify existing resources into one and I can't see why Samsung didn't realize this.

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