Mobile thoughts

Mobile platform war

2010-10-10T22:02:00.006+02:00

I was presenting the following stuff on Hungarian Free Software Conference that took place in Szeged last Friday. The pre-defined 20-25 minutes presentation time was a serious constraint that didn't allow presenters to make lengthy presentations.

You know, I believe in a presentation style where the presenter doesn't simply read out his/her presentation in front of the audience, but completes it with meaningful and useful information. I'm sorry for not being able to do the latter this time, yet hope that the material alone will be readable and useful.

Enjoy,

Tote

Forum Nokia Champion - Elected for the fifth time

2010-03-01T22:37:00.005+01:00

I've just been informed by Nokia that I had got re-elected for the fourth time as a Forum Nokia Champion for 2010, thus it's my 5th year in succession from the launch of this program. It's definitely worth looking back what has happened in the past 4 years.

I started as a keen contributor to NewLC Symbian forum back in 2004. I had been programming for Symbian for 4 years by then when I "opened my eyes" to see that there were quite many independent developers eagerly looking for help on Symbian programming. I was fortunate enough to be "close to the fire" as I had been contributing to S60 platform development and as such had good resources to learn from. With the wish of helping others, I was an active contributor of the afore-mentioned forum.

Then came 2006 when Nokia kicked-off Forum Nokia Champion program to reward those people who had voluntarily helped the community and spread the word. People who were not only developers: one of the best examples is Anina, "an international model with a passion for technology". The word? Yeah, mobile development in general and those technologies in particular that had to do with Nokia. Like Symbian, Java, Flash, etc.

The good things offered to FNCs (our short name), among others, are:

Welcome device (one per year), I just voted for an N900 this year
Semiannual Forum Nokia Champion Day held at various places
Market yourself as a FNC backed by Nokia's brand, which is not only valuable when you're an individual, but your company is also authorized to use the FNC logo
Early access to new hardware, documentation.

Thanks to this program I met such people that I would never have done and learned about the use of mobile in medicine, developing countries in Africa, heard how people at universities get in touch with mobile, how an RC car can be controlled with a mobile, etc. I made friendships, took part in writing a book, got to know fellow Hungarians whom I would have never met otherwise. Met friendly Indians, heard about inventive people from the Orient and was proud when one of my workmates got also nominated as an FNC.

We created our informal e-mail group that is an inexhaustible source of mobile development knowledge, are available on LinkedIn (closed group, sorry), share ideas, job ads, etc among ourselves, and ultimately form a loose network of trustworthy people that we can always turn to with our problems.

I've also been rewarded by numerous small and not so small gifts during the years of my membership, being the biggest is the opportunity that I could travel around the world for the sake of meeting my fellow champions: I've been in Singapore, Las Vegas where I didn't lose a dime, London where I was one of the presenters and Budapest my home town at the time.

And even though my main focus has turned from being a "plain" Symbian developer long ago to sharing opinion on blogs and other forums as well as actively helping Nokia do their business, the point is still the same: it IS worth being a Forum Nokia Champion.

Who else has remained from the original founding members?

Tote

On Google's move in navigation

2009-10-29T21:55:00.009+01:00

It's been announced a couple of days ago that turn-by-turn GPS navigation would be supported soon on devices based on Android 2.0 platform. Free of charge. The new Google Maps Navigation offers free turn-by-turn navigation garnished with Google's core business (search by voice and in plain English, search along route) and existing services (traffic, satellite and street views) for Android devices.

I was shocked to hear this news. The two biggest map data providers, Tele Atlas and Navteq, have been acquired a few years ago, former for $2.9bn by TomTom latter for $8.1bn by Nokia. Their main revenue sources were licensed map data and value added services e.g. turn-by-turn navigation. Since Google uses either its own map data or one that is freely available, I think I told everything: they do whatever they want. It is still unknown how Google will monetize on the new service - other than ruining competitors -, but advertisement seems to be a very likely option.

On a related note, I found Bill Gurley's article on Less than free business model quite interesting. Briefly, Google offers Android to OEMs free of royalty, even more, they pay ad split to them. In other words, it's not only that OEMs don't have to pay, but on the contrary, they will get paid. One of the commenters of this article gave a hint on another business model that Google may try to follow: don't bother with ads, but offer a package to navigation device makers, news agencies, automakers, roadside advertisers, etc. A package that is based on continuously updated traffic data that can be used to provide always optimal routing information.

How can competitors react on Google's move? Without own map data it's very difficult to compete with someone who's giving away the same service that we are selling.

Stefan from IntoMobile suggested that Nokia should make map data free and wait for the flood of new mapping services - let's see what innovation will result in. Not a bad idea, but would leave Nokia in a bit of passive role, wouldn't it?
The other option could be to do the same as Google may do in the future: sell a package instead of showing ads (see above). Why Nokia? Because it has maps data. Which platform? It's rather Maemo than Symbian - we're talking not only about mobile phones, but other embedded devices, too.
Finally, the third option is advertising and provide free service. Who? Microsoft doesn't have own map data, but has Bing and Yahoo! search, which is a good basis for advertising. Whereas Nokia doesn't have search, but has maps data (I told you that Nokia should have bought Yahoo!). Perhaps these companies should form an alliance?

Looking forward to your comments,

Tote

Enterprise Mobility Development

2009-10-28T09:34:00.006+01:00

Some of you might have read one of my previous posts in which I wrote that I had had to choose between mobile and enterprise development mostly for personal reasons. I was sorry to realize this because mobile is my passion, but I thought the change was inevitable. Now I don't.

It's a cliche that the job market is much bigger for enterprise developers than for mobile devs. That was one of the main reasons why I had to change area, too - not as if I didn't enjoy enterprise as well. The interesting thing I've just come to realize that there's a gap between the boundaries of the two areas: it's for people with knowledge on both (otherwise huge) areas. The opportunity is great for both kinds of developers coming from either direction, because it offers a way to reach out even more people.

Now you understand why I read an article the other day with great interest: it described the required skill set for an enterprise mobility developer. First, it just confirmed that my theory was right: there's a need for such people. Second, let me add some more points to the list provided. I could have extended the list on the original blog post, however, for that I should have had an account on that site which I was reluctant to create. Here's the list:

Bandwidth: I think it was network what the author really meant. Bandwidth really is one of the characteristics that one needs to pay attention to, but it's also worth mentioning different types of networks (from 2G to 3.5G, WiFi, VPN, etc.), their main characteristics (e,g IP address re-assignments, frequent network outage), roaming, etc.
Options for development: today's popular web development (very important to note that it's mostly applicable for smartphones only, thus not an option for the vast majority of mobile phones) vs native vs any other environments.
Testing: never-ever forget that emulator/simulator is not the same as the real hardware. Peculiarities of various networks also count (quality, reliability, QoS, etc.).
Option for cross-platform development: one company may target one platform at a time, however, it's also wise to plan ahead and build the foundation with the future in mind.
Deployment, maintenance: app stores vs downloadable install packages from own site. Keeping enterprise service and mobile client versions in sync so that they're always fully inter-operable. Auto-update. Etc.
Monetization, marketing: what I really mean here is making use of app stores as efficiently as possible. It's today's trend for mobile manufacturers to have their own stores and compete with carriers who would also like to monetize on this opportunity (by having their own stores). Sort of a war between vertical (manufacturers) and horizontal (carriers).

And I'm sure we've still missed a lot from the list. In any case, that was my two cents. :)

Cheers,

Tote

Smartphone OS market share - 2012

2009-10-08T22:23:00.014+02:00

Yes, you read it right: it's 2012. Gartner published a report (link: Computerworld) in which they forecast the following smartphone OS market share for 2012:

We could all see the trend which players remain, disappear or gain strong foothold for a while by now. Nokia has always been the strongest when it comes to smartphones and they will be able to keep their position according to Gartner. They have a huge loyal user base and Nokia as an Internet company and phone manufacturer in one will probably be able to fight successfully against its competitors.

Apple has great technical innovations (form factor, made touch trendy with multitouch, etc.) in addition to the ability to sell (how easy it is to forget about this!). Their tight control on most parts of the mobile value chain is very different compared to what their competitors do, but it has proven to affect user experience in the right way and made this business very profitable for the company.

Google is a goliath in Internet business with huge influence on people's lives already. They use this power to become successful in mobile business with a great strategy: cost reduction for everyone, let it be manufacturers, network operators, developers, users, etc.

All these companies are able to make people passionate about their devices. The term, convergence, has been already accompanied with smartphones in the past few years, however, it's always been about integrating something into the device: MP3 player, FM radio, digital camera, GPS, etc. This time it's different: we're living the age of integrating the mobile phone into an even bigger thing, a cloud called Internet. It's no surprise why Google is successful with Android: people are already dependent on their services and they "only" had to provide the means for mobile users to access these services via their beloved gadgets.

It wouldn't be surprising if these figures became true by 2012. All the remaining players are less innovative (Palm Pre is a copy of iPhone), struggling with finding their identity (M$), are not offering a portfolio that is wide enough (BlackBerry is a business phone), etc. It might be worth noting that data communication will be dominant by 2012 and will drive the growth of MID-market. Wonder if Gartner has reckoned with this, too.

Tote

Ps.: Google Chart API is our friend. :)

Fate of Symbian C++

2009-10-03T17:00:00.003+02:00

Historically, Symbian OS has evolved from EPOC, a mobile operating system written originally by Psion. The foundations were laid down in the 80's and a lot of work had been done to it while it became EPOC32 in the late 90's, the direct predecessor of Symbian OS. Also for historical reasons, the developers of Symbian decided to deviate from standard C and not-yet-standard C++ and create their own flavour of programming language. They thought their own exception mechanism (aka leaving), string handling (alias descriptors), naming conventions (C, M, R, T classes), etc. are better than anything else and make it the most appropriate tool to write an entire operating system and related frameworks for resource constrained devices.

They were probably right. But since it was a deviation from "normal" it was a question of time to turn out if people tolerate the difference. People, also known as developers. Through developers the whole market. Small and big players alike.

When Nokia acquired Trolltech speculation started. About Nokia's real reason, I mean. A lot of people didn't believe that it was "just" about making a common framework for smart- and feature phones + desktop computers. Personally, I thought it was a really valid reason alone, though naturally wondered how it would affect the future of Symbian.

People also speculated if not only will Nokia replace Avkon (the UI framework for Symbian S60) with Qt, but change from Symbian to Linux, too. Time has proven that it was not the case. Symbian OS was - and it still is - so valuable that it wouldn't have made sense to throw it out. Nokia has achieved so much with this operating system, put so much money in the development of it and most importantly the system has proven that it DOES work so that it is reliable, secure, can be customized, etc. It simply made sense to keep it.

The latest news about Qt vs Symbian C++ is that "Qt will take over the application layer on Symbian devices, among others, reducing Symbian development to under-the-hood core programming at best" (from El Reg). At best. So finally it seems the market (again, through developers) didn't tolerate the afore-mentioned deviation. Not as if developers didn't have a bunch of alternatives to develop for Symbian devices: Flash, web run-time, Java, Python, .NET, etc. Still, the programming language that offered the most freedom to developers has apparently failed to attract and keep the masses. It is now time to retreat in the wings.

In the closing words, let me chew upon how much marketing could have supported this programming language to become more popular. Take, for example, the "official" language of iPhone development: objective C. Is it a deviation from standard C? Yes. It's not even C++, if that counts at all. Is it easy to learn? Personally I didn't have the chance to study it, but my ex-colleagues did and they told me that it wasn't that difficult as they had anticipated. Admit that they had a decade of experience in mobile sw development that most people don't. What I'd like to point out, though, is that there are languages that are much easier to learn and use in practice, such as Java, Python and the likes. All in all, I think Obj-C is at least as much deviated from the standard as Symbian C++.

Then why is it so popular in contrast with Symbian C++? Perhaps it's because of the tools - compare the two emulators, for example. Or is it the processes - there are pros and cons on both sides: Symbian Signed has received much criticism, but Apple approval process is not much better, either. Or is it the hype that surrounds iPhone devices and related development environment that made developers to forget about the imperfection of this language? I think it's pretty much that case. What made the hype? Innovation and marketing, i.e. that Apple could find out something new and they could sell it, too.

Symbian C++ could have been saved with a bit more selling power, in my opinion. It is not going to disappear, just less apparent. And I don't cry for it, because I know it's called evolution. I just wonder what those years will be worth of that I had spent with it.

Tote

A book on porting to Symbian

2009-10-02T19:14:00.004+02:00

Let me be proud for a moment: I've co-authored Mark Wilcox's great book, Porting to the Symbian platform. I've written the part the describes what is worth knowing for an Android developer when porting to Symbian C/C++. What makes me even prouder is that one of my ex-colleagues was also involved - Gabor Morvay wrote the section of iPhone to Qt porting. It's great to make use of knowledge in such a way!

Great work, Mark, good luck with the sales! :)

Tote

New blog

2009-07-28T00:54:00.004+02:00

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that I've just opened a new blog @ Wordpress.com: https://gabortorok.wordpress.com/. Whilst this one is for posts about my passion & profession, the other is rather about my private life. I mean as much as it can be private when I blog about it. :)

Welcome,

Tote

Change from mobile

2009-07-13T23:13:00.004+02:00

Hungary. My mother country. A small one, actually, in the heart of Europe. Mobile penetration is relatively high, although the vast majority is feature- and low-end phones and not smartphones. Definitely not a good market for smartphone applications - people don't have too much money to spend. There are not too many software companies, either, doing mobile development.

Take a family with a few kids. Far away from any help from grandparents. Would be great to move closer to them, but the country is so centralized that one cannot afford leaving the capitol without risking to lose the opportunity to work in mobile industry. Besides, the sheer size of Budapest (i.e. the capitol) requires hours of commuting each day - time spent with being away from family without any meaning.

Which option to choose: stay and work in mobile, but suffer from distances and the lack of help OR move and enjoy less hassle, but work in a so-far not-well-known industry?

I chose the latter.

Not as if the new work wasn't exciting. It's just different and I don't know how much I'll be missing mobile from which I got a lot, to which I gave a lot, from which I didn't get as much as I expected.

Perhaps it's time to be passionate about something different. Time will tell if it was a good decision.

Cheers.

Android and the threat of fragmentation

2009-07-03T23:21:00.002+02:00

It's an honour to be asked to write an article for Vision Mobile blog. But I did it and it's available at http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2009/07/android-and-the-threat-of-fragmentation/.

Enjoy,

Tote

Audials Mobile - Free music from social radios

2009-05-07T19:44:00.017+02:00

This is the first time I review a mobile software by the request of the authors. I've been contacted by the creators of Audials Mobile to check out their latest product, which I really enjoyed to do. Here goes my analysis.

Audials Mobile is a cell phone software that you can use to download free music in MP3 format from the newest generation of social radio stations. You can pick-up your choice from over 70,000 artists and 80 genres that are really compelling numbers for an average user like me. I also received my license key so that I could soon get rid of the limitation of the trial software (free to download up to 2 songs) and use the full-blown version.

Installation

The product can be downloaded from Audials' web page and installed without any problems. The user's attention is drawn politely to the used phone features so that no-one shall be surprised about any hidden functionality. The number of tweaks the user can do is kept at a minimum (which is good!): network connection, recording path and checks for software update are among the options.

Main features

The product offers the following core features:

Search & download based on artist. The user can choose from an auto-complete list of artists, most populars are starred and listed at the beginning for more efficient searching. Having picked-up the artist, the available records are listed in the next view also indicating which social site the given track can be downloaded from.
Search & download based on genre. One can find the same records, but via a different route.
Browse own song collection. Already downloaded songs are here + those that are currently being downloaded.

I used this application via a WiFi connection at home. Thus, songs were downloaded fast and although the downloads always took a bit more on mobile than in my desktop browser the difference was insignificant. The product uses the platform's built-in music player to play music, which is good for stability and user experience + it nicely integrates to Idle screen, too.

In addition, Audials Mobile has a plug-in framework, too. Anyone can extend the functionality of the software by adding one or more sources that users can download music from.

Bugs

There's not really too much I disliked about this software. There's only one thing that was very annoying and it had to do with Flash Video (.flv files). Yes, Audio Mobile offers the feature of grabbing music out of a video file, however, it - for some reason - fails to do it properly. I can download the music and the resulting file is in MP3 format, however, the only thing I can hear is some crappy sound.

Suggestions

My hints for improvement are as follows:

I was missing the ability of going 'back' to the application during music playback: when I press 'Back' the playback always gets interrupted.
Always-on network connection drains battery and is not necessary anyway - connect to network only when it's really required.
Would be great if I could suspend/resume recording, i.e. downloading songs from the Net. Now you can either let it finish or stop the download entirely.
Might be only my narrow-minded preference, but searching by genre/film I expected a list of movie titles, too, not only composers.
Parallel download: even though it is possible to make a list of downloadable contents, the files are still downloaded sequentially one after the other. This might eventually result in that a long download holds back the download of other smaller files that would potentially finish sooner.

Conclusion

Audials Mobile is a great application that I really enjoyed to play with. It almost always delivered what I expected from it and did it with good performance. The application is easy to use, I could not discover any fancy or unnecessary features.

It's another question if/how long will it remain legal to download content this way. I mean I'm keen to download free MP3s, even albums with this app, however, if you look at the Swedish court decision in BitTorrent's case I'm a bit sceptic about the future of such a solution.

But as long as it's not explicitly forbidden by law I'm happy to use it. :)

Tote

MoMoHu - Telco to Web by NSN

2009-05-05T19:11:00.004+02:00

Damn, so many abbreviations, let me elaborate them.

Mobile Monday Hungary has had another round yesterday with Nokia Siemens Networks giving presentation about Telco to Web. The event was also hosted by NSN at a nice place at their premises.

After a brief introduction given by Robert Esik, there came the "real" presentation about the main topic presented by Said Berrahil. Said's presentation skills are really fascinating and it didn't take a minute to hear the first laughs from the audience. Funny, still serious, informative and thought-provoking. The whole presentation was built around the seven deadly sins, which the operators have committed so far. Don't take it that seriously, though: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride were all mentioned and with the obvious exception of lust some examples helped us understand what network operators did wrong.

Achievements were also mentioned, though! Since it's naturally not only bad things that operators have done so far. It's even more understandable that achievements were highlighted from a company whose main customers are the operators themselves, right? :) I found it a bit odd, though, that after talking so much about operators' business (don't forget that NSN is not an operator!) Said didn't talk too much about what they had been doing lately.

Finally there was a half an hour free Q&A session after the presentaion where people were really active to talk about the topic. I was surprised to see so many people (35-40) interested in such a not-so-popular topic and have heard lots of good and insightful comments.

Looking forward to the next event!

Tote

The $1 business model

2009-03-16T10:51:00.015+01:00

There are two kinds of developers: those who want to sell their programs and those who write software for fun and/or for fame. The latter type is happy with writing freeware, most probably open source software. This article is about the former.

Of course, most developers want to get paid for their programs. As much as possible. The wiser usually analyses the market first:

Would people be interested in the program?
Would they be willing to pay for it?
How much will they think the program is worth?
What about competition, would our program fill a gap or it would just be one of the many?
How can I sell my program, what distribution channels are available, what is the revenue share, etc?
How much do I need to invest in writing the program financially, in terms of effort, etc.?

And the list is not over yet. But it contains the most important question from this article's point of view: how much is a program worth, how much can we ask for it? Note: the answers to these questions are not necessarily the same.

It is very difficult to foretell how much a program is worth for the users. The answer depends on so many factors, such as target group, their spending habits, type of software (e.g. leisure vs professional), what other programs with similar feature-set cost, etc. Naturally, price calculation is so often affected by that how much a developer appreciates his/her own software ("I put so many hours in creating it that it can't be cheap!") - and the expectations and the reality are not always in balance.

The available distribution channels also influence the final price: what they demand from the developer, what they offer to him, their revenue sharing model, etc. As to the latter, for example, although the 70-30 revenue share wasn't typical 1-2 years ago it is now becoming a standard. Apple's App Store, OHA's Android Market, Nokia's soon-to-be-opened Ovi Store all offer 70% off the revenue to the developer. Revenue share is not everything, though: for example, App Store is such a place where it's not uncommon to hear success stories and big earnings, whereas Android Market's community prefers free software. If you follow the news, you might have heard of the coming BlackBerry App World. I found it very interesting that they set the minimum price for a paid-for application to be $3. They said any software that is not worth this amount shall be freeware. I think it's ridiculous: these guys are not aware of how many developer they will alienate from themselves with this approach. Do they really want developers to sell BB apps or not?

The typical revenue models for developers are as follows:

Release free application first with limited features and make it paid when it really gets traction (thousands, tens of thousand downloads per month). The application is available either for free or as paid-for (exclusive OR). Question: won't people turn away from your application once they have to pay for it?
Write an always paid program, which means that your application must be really cool and advertised so well that despite the price (i.e. that it costs money) people buy it. Question: can you compete with free programs with similar features?
Make a Lite and Pro version of your program, Lite being free and Pro paid. The free version supports a subset of Pro's features making it compelling enough to purchase the paid version. It is a very typical approach among developers. Notes: increased maintenance efforts + separation of free and paid-for features must be well thought-out.
Free program with ads. Notes:

Not all people like ads
You need to find a good ad provider
It is challenging to implement a good advertising solution on mobile devices, and there is no good framework available.

Change model dynamically on an experimental basis: see if you can make it with paid version, if not then make it free, then make it paid again when it becomes popular (this is the path iStrip followed, actually). Question: when will people get bored with this behavior?

Please note that I did not include that model in the above list, where the client program is free, but it is essentially a light-weight interface to a server solution, which is exactly what your customers are paying for. Opera Mini's business model is based on this, for example: Opera Mini, the application, is available for anyone as a free download, however, it's Opera's customers (i.e network operators), who pay the price. This article is simply not about this model.

It's also worth noting how important user ratings have become recently. Some developers faced that ratings can kill: unhappy-uneducated users gave low ratings just because "game was too short", they "expected more", "it was free not too long ago", etc. Perhaps these users are not aware of how much power they have in their hands when they rate. Applications written for Android platform and distributed on Android Market are especially vulnerable to this effect.

Finally, getting closer to the point: how much can we ask for a program? Even though this habit is changing, it's still quite typical from people that they think that "cheap cannot be good" or "if it's good it can't be cheap". However, App Store's success stories have proven right the opposite: developers claimed that their revenue had become much higher when they lowered the price to $0.99. You know, this is such a low price that basically anyone can afford around the world even for the silliest program. Developers are now facing the fact that unless they sell their software at the lowest price there will be others who ask less than them. This basically forces them to sell their apps for $1 from the beginning.

Is it the final price, though? Can a $1 hit be sold for $2, too? No-one knows. It's all about making experiments. If I were to sell my app that I think is worth more than being distributed as a freeware, I would ask $1 for it. If people don't buy it at this low price, then I saved the hassle of price calibration. If it gets successful and my program is (one of) the best(s) in its category, then I would increase the price gradually until the download rate gets stabilized and I couldn't expect more revenue from making it even more expensive.

And actually this is what I call the $1 business model.

Looking forwad to your comments,

Tote

Smartphone market share, 2008

2009-03-12T16:31:00.006+01:00

Gartner released their statistics about worldwide smartphone sales, which contains useful information not only the previous quarter (Q4 2008), but the whole past year. I'd like to share the following two figures with you:

Comments:

Nokia is still #1, but it's market position is seriously challenged by RIM, Apple and HTC.
Even Apple is suffering from decreased sales in Q4, but that didn't prevent them from being ranked as the third vendor by sales.

Comments:

Symbian had lived better days a year ago, but it's still a bit more than 50% of smartphones that runs this operating system.
RIM and Mac OS X performed exceptionally well even during the tough economical situation.
Although the share of Windows Mobile shrank a bit, it still maintains its third position. Only blinds can't see that not for long.

Finally, some words on regional sales:

Dramatic increase (69%) is experienced in sales of smartphone in North-America, which now accounts for 20% of mobile phones in this region. Carriers are agressively pushing data plans that is beneficial for vendors, too, offering vertical mobile solutions from hardware manufacturing to providing developer SDKs to cloud services.
While overall device sales dropped, Asia/Pacific recorded a 2.3% growth in smartphone sales.
EMEA region were up by only 2%, Western-Europe sales increased by 9.6%. Samsung drove sales in 2008 with Omnia as its most successful product.

Tote

Mobile advertising - An experience

2009-03-04T09:52:00.003+01:00

Background

I decided to give a try to a Reversi-like game found on the Internet just the other day. There was a link to an installation package, which I downloaded and manually installed on my Nokia N95. Even though there was nothing mentioned about that the application is ad-supported, I found the name of the program suspicious since it revealed something about this fact. Never mind, I thought I would still give it a try even though I don't like suprises that come in the form of embedded installation packages (for non-Symbianers: an installation package can contain other 3rd-party software, too, which the main application depends on - these additional programs are referred to as embedded installation packages). Nevertheless, the complementary software has become so intrusive during the installation process and wanted to know such information about me (surprise: it gave me a default birth year, which was exactly the year I was born in - was it an accident or it could find it out somehow?) that I was unwilling to give. Finally I gave up the installation with some bitter taste in my mouth. That was my first experience with Adtronic.

As to mobile advertisement

It's a cliché that there are three-times more mobile devices than desktop computers. If people believe that desktop computers are the homeland of Internet and advertising they will soon have to realize that the transition has already begun from one to the other. Undoubtedly, a device that is always with us is much more compelling platform for advertisers to reach their audience. Their are challenges, though:

Generally the 'context' is an invaluable piece of information from advertising's point of view:

What is the user's location so that those ads will be shown first that are more relevant at that place.
Any kind of information can come in handy regarding the user's social network (gender, age, habits, relation to user, etc.) for better targeted ads.
What the user really wants to do in the given moment, such as browsing to a car rental web page, calling a carpenter, receiving a status report SMS from the bank, etc.

Mobile phones has different characteristics as desktop computers: one of the most notable differences is that they have smaller display giving less room for nice ads that can easily capture the user's attention.

Questions to the 'Audience'

There are couple of things that even I, as a advertisement target, have to answer. The root question is the same in all cases: How much am I willing to give up from my freedom when using my beloved gadget?

How frequently may ads appear without disturbing me?
How much should I let the ad-provider know about my context?
What can an ad do without being too intrusive?
Is it a single application that is 'ad-aware' or I let my entire phone user experience be 'ad-driven'?

Adtronic

Based on what I wrote above you can imagine that I classified Adtronic software as 'suspicious'. But I was surprised to read Forum Nokia Newsletter this morning giving fame to Adtronic. Was it early to judge this software, I asked. A brief summary to those not wanting to visit Forum Nokia:

Adtronic offers advertising solution for S60 devices.
Ads are shown upon new/missed calls, SMS, MMS. Ads usually appear above alert dialogs covering the majority of screen real estate.
How many ads are shown a day can be limited by the user - one must not count on a lot of earned points if it's severely limited, though.
Earned points can be used in various ways

For reduction of phone bill (who will take care of this?)
Points can be used to purchase other applications at a discounted price
Or can be redeemed for GreenPeace, Unicef (nice feature)

The whole solution relies on a working network connection resulting in some data traffic (how much?).

Adtronic offers better monetization to developers should they allow their applications to be bundled with this service. May I ask, though: is it really the price users (not the developers!) have to pay to use applications at a low price? Am I wrong with that selling $0.99 programs also works in Apple's App Store and I bet it will soon work on Android Market, too? Do we really need this?

Another question I'd like to be answered, too: where can I use my points to purchase applications? Is it Adtronic's own store? Or an operator store? How does the whole idea fit into the model of unified content store that all device/platform vendors are pushing lately?

I'm sure I've missed a lot of points with regards to the topic. Could you please make the picture clearer? Thanks!

Tote

Mobile Monday Budapest - Great success!

2009-02-24T16:24:00.004+01:00

We held the second Mobile Monday Budapest event yesterday evening. As I already wrote, the topic was mobile software development: Android and Symbian in particular. My colleague gave a great presentation on Android and I talked about Symbian. Unfortunately, the third presenter was not able to come, thus we didn't have a presentation about iPhone development. Nevertheless, we still tried to cover as wide range of platforms during the free Q&A session as possible.

There were something like 50 engineering-minded people (like us:), brave enough to ask smart questions, eager to learn from the others (not only from presenters) and willing to network. The event was sponsored by Forum Nokia (event site is available at bantora.com) and my employer, Agil Eight. Thanks for both!

I'm so happy that this habit slowly becomes a tradition - it's exactly this what we need in our small country. Looking forward to the upcoming MoMo Budapest even in April!

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Mobile worm, Yxes.A - an analysis

2009-02-20T11:03:00.003+01:00

F-Secure and FortiGruard both reported that a new worm, Yxes.A, is spreading on Nokia smartphones based on S60 3rd Edition platform (and probably higher, too). According to FortiGuard:

"It gathers phone numbers from the infected device's file system, and repeatedly attempts to send SMS messages to those. The messages feature a malicious Web address (URL); upon "clicking" on the address in the received message, the recipients will download a copy of the worm (provided their phones/subscriptions allow for internet browsing)." That is, it's a Trojan.
Beyond propagating to as many users as possible via the strategy mentioned above, the worm's aim is to gather intelligence on the infected victim (such as serial number of the phone, subscription number) and post it to a remote server likely controlled by cyber criminals.
It's also noted that worm can mutate easily: "As far as our analysis goes, the worm currently does not take commands from the remote servers it contacts. However, since the copies hosted on the malicious servers are controlled by the cyber criminals, they may update them whenever they want, thereby effectively mutating the worm, adding or removing functionality." It's not that simple, though. It's not like download a new EXE from the Net and it will just work. No new EXE or DLL (a plug-in, for example) can be installed without the assistance of Application Installer, which will eventually require user's attention and approval. Some files that don't have to be installed can be downloaded, though, containing instructions for the worm to execute, however, it's becoming a science fiction if we think that any malware author will put THAT much effort in developing such a system. I'm highly sceptical on that it would be a real threat and refuse to be threatened by that.
It's also reported that "On launch, the worm executes as the process 'EConServer.exe', which is likely meant to camouflage alongside the existing legitimate system process 'EComServer.exe'". This simply doesn't mean anything: if a process name is only similar to another (system) process name then it doesn't imply anything. And anyway, EComServer.exe is never launched by hand (but by the system upon device start), consequently it's not a valid scenario that the malicious EXE gets launched instead.
It's a very agressive application, since it "will also automatically run every time the device is rebooted / power cycled. Further, it bears a destructive nature and will kill certain processes such as the application manager (AppMgr)." If that's true then the program must hold very strong capabilities that cannot be granted by a self-signed certificate.

You can see from the list above that the worm can be malicious, indeed. Following from the last point we can conclude even more:

The program couldn't be self-signed, since the program requires such strong capabilities that the Application Installer will never grant to a self-signed installable.
It couldn't be signed via Open Signed Offline*, either, since that would limit the spread only to max 1000 devices with given IMEI numbers.
It couldn't be Certified Signed*, either, since that requires a thorough test done by an official Test House. Even if they hadn't done a thorough test, such a behavior must have turned out very soon.
All that means that it was Express Signed*. You know, one characteristic of Express Signed is that they do occasional testing, which means that there might be some malicious apps that can go through this filter.

What counter-measures can be taken? First, the certificate of the malware author must be revoked. That means that whenever they will try to publish another application, whatever it will do it will not be allowed to be distributed, but will be filtered out automatically. This doesn't comfort any victims of this virus, though (hmm, are there any?).

Second, it would be just great if OCSP-checking was enabled on every phone by default. OCSP is a protocol that allows the Installer to check it in a database that a certificate is revoked or not. Although it is available on each S60 phones, it is disabled by default. But I go even further: it's not only the Installer that should use it, but other components of the system, too. In fact, the system itself should perform such a cross-check at regular intervals if any of the installed applications have become undesirable for the user (i.e. the certificate used to sign that application has got revoked) in the mean time. I'm unsure as to why this mechanism can be disabled at all, probably because it requires a network connection and data exchange with a remote server. But I think this should be something that operators shouldn't charge for - isn't it in their best interest, too, that the devices using their network wouldn't get infected?

* For more information on various signing schemes, please visit Symbian Signed.

Any thoughts are welcome,

Tote

Mobile Monday Budapest - Mobile Software Development

2009-02-16T22:22:00.004+01:00

It's time for the 2^nd Mobile Monday Budapest event! This time the topic is mobile software development and we selected the three hottest platforms: iPhone, Android and Symbian. I wrote 'we', because I'm among the organizers as well as one of the presenters: my presentation will cover Symbian-based development.

Some information on the event:

Date: Feb 23, 2009

Time: 18:00 - 21:00

Venue: BUTE, Magyar Tudósok Körútja 2, Room 019

For more information, please refer to Nokia's new web service, Bantora, or Mobile Monday Hungary.

Everybody is welcome!

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Malware on Android: It has begun

2009-01-27T22:13:00.003+01:00

No, it's not going to be yet-another I told you so post. Though I did. :) You might have heard of the spreading of MemoryUp virus on Android-powered devices. There are numerous articles mentioning it (like this one ;), let me cite one of them from phoneArena:

"As strange as it may seem, a lot of users have complained of the MemorUp app..."

What is so strange in this? Android's security model is an open invitation to malware authors: anyone can write an application and distribute it freely on Android Market. The secret is that although every application must be signed, it's not mandatory that the certificate used for signing be certified by a Certificate Authority. In other words, you can self-sign your own application. Accountability is lost.

"We’re more worried about the fact that such a harmful application has found its way to Android Market and has stayed unnoticed until now."

That's exactly how Android Market works. I'm surprised that you're surprised. Anyone can write and freely distribute their own programs that may even be a malware. Signing ought to prevent from mass virus distribution - as long as signing certificates are certified by CAs (authors can be traced back and prevented from continuing malicious activity). Which is sadly not the case, see above.

"If it has managed to creep inside, wouldn’t there be a chance for others?"

It's not a question, I'm sure there will be more. Even though self-signed applications are limited as to what they're allowed to do, MemoryUp has showed us that this restriction is not enough.

The question is rather what could be done against this phenomenon? One option is that Google leaves it untouched: it will turn out very quickly if a program is malware or not (well, unless if it's a timed bomb). Another alternative is be stricter on what a self-signed app can do and allow only properly (i.e. CA) signed programs to act freely (after user's confirmation, of course). The strictest option would, of course, be if self-signing was not allowed at all. I'm sure you've noticed that the last two options mean that developers would need to pay for (CA) signing. Which is against the principles of Android development.

Looking forward to Google's reaction,

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MicroWeather for S60 goes Open Source

2009-01-22T09:40:00.004+01:00

I usually don't write about specific mobile software, but this time it's a bit different. You know, it's one thing that one of my colleagues, Jouni Miettunen, became a Forum Nokia Champion last time thanks to his active participation in Python for S60 community. I'm really proud of him, he really deserved the honour.

But it seems that the spirit of open source software has "infected" another colleague of mine. Gabor Fetter, author of MicroPool (a bestseller in its category), MicroPinball and MicroWeather has now decided to make his last piece of software open source. I'm not going into praising MicroWeather, let it be enough that I use it daily. For more information, you can check out the official page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/microweathers60/. But you can do more than being in read-only mode: why not contribute to it? Any ideas, contribution are welcome!

I'm happy to see that we're that agile! ;-)

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What is the world's most recognized song?

2009-01-19T23:02:00.004+01:00

Thanks to the Carnival of Mobilists and more importantly the great analysis from Tomi Ahonen I learnt where the original Nokia tune is from. I'm not a tune-addict, still I can't stop listening to this one. Enjoy!

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Thoughts on Palm Pre

2009-01-14T10:17:00.005+01:00

Of course, I've seen Palm's keynote from CES 2009. I've also read quite a few blogs, comments on the topic and now would like to share my impressions about it.

First of all, I liked the device! It looks great, the addition of a QWERTY-keyboard makes it even more complete. The UI looks intuitive, I pretty much liked the introduced card system, where you could switch between running applications. In general it's a fancy device with a high WOW-factor.

Then, what else? Well, my first impression was that it's a copy device, an iClone. It's just a better iPhone, not as if it was not a remarkable thing alone. Nevertheless, I have a few questions on copying a bestselling device in general:

Is that allowed to sell a very similar device with some enhancements? I'm pretty sure that Apple patented a lot of things and I'm surprised to see the same multi-touch functionality to be present in Palm Pre, for example.
Is that nice? Does it make good to Palm's reputation that everyone knows that "iPhone was the first"? I'm pretty sure, though, that Palm will not feel sorry if it's profitable and legally okay.
Will this strategy work at all? As Michael Mace greatly puts it: "... Pre is a better e-mail device than the iPhone and a better consumer device than a Blackberry ... [but] it's probably a worse entertainment device than the iPhone (because it doesn't have iTunes) and probably a worse e-mail device than RIM (because it doesn't have RIM's server infrastructure)." The thing is that we don't know too much other than a technical specification. How much will it cost? What services will be available for the user? In general, why users will want to buy Pre instead of other competing products? And lots of other questions, partly covered below.

I wonder how it will work out that Palm is fighting against such competitors who have existing products in their portfolio. Pre is said to be available in H1/2009 in Sprint's network, but no news about pricing policy, international availability, etc. yet. If Palm will be able to ship this product with such a great technical parameters, their top-priority will (have to) be to build an ecosystem around it. That most importantly means services that 1: give Palm post-sales revenue and 2: tempt users to choose rather Palm's device than any other competitor's. In addition to that, developers must be inspired to make great applications that boost 3rd-party business, too.

In fact, development on Palm is a big question mark to me. You know, I've never been into Palm development, but what I've read from others on this topic was that 1: WebOS is a completely new software architecture, 2: with no backward compatibility. In other words, old applications will not run on the new device. I mean, it's not only that you have to make some tweaking on your existing software and then it will run in the new environment (think of the introduction of Platform Security in Symbian and what that meant to old software), but you have to completely re-write it and even then it's not guaranteed that it will work. Why? Because the keyword for the new SDK is that it's about web-development. Palm toed the line by supporting WebKit (their browser is based on it) and it's great that there's a common platform available on most smartphones by now. Well, Microsoft still resists and I bet that they will always do. In general that means that the boundary between mobile- and full web becomes more and more blurred, but that alone doesn't give you the promise of "Mobile development Paradise". Why? Because you simply can't solve everything with the HTML/CSS/JavaScript trinity. How will you develop your own VoIP, image processing, gaming, etc. application with this technology stack, for example? It's simply not the right tool for a lot of things in software development as in fact no one technology stack can be. But if you limit yourself to one then you eventually shrink your software market. I'm not saying that it will be the only way for development in the future, however, at least it was the message that I got from the keynote.

Finally, two features that captured my attention for different reasons:

Multi-tasking, i.e. being able to run more than one application in parallel. Everybody is keen on that and points out that how great it is compared to the iPhone. And then what? I think it's not an innovation at all - I would say that what's the innovation in the 21^st century of NOT being able to do that. Damn, Apple was better again in doing that. :)
Card-system. Everyone who's seen the keynote or any preview can tell that it's about accessing simultaneously running applications: different apps are shown in a list as playing cards and can be manipulated in a very intuitive way. No doubt, it's a great idea and I'd be happy to use it on other phones, too.

Comments are welcome,

Tote

Update: this post has been included in Carnival of the Mobilists 157. Check it out for other interesting articles about mobile topics!

Predictions for 2009

2009-01-02T17:34:00.017+01:00

I'm only a little bit more experienced in predicting future trends than I was last year, still I'd like to continue what I started a year ago. Who knows, maybe I'll be at least as right as I was last year?

Let's start with reviewing what I wrote previously and what really happened in 2008:

I commented on ad-driven content and how much e.g. Google depends on operators in allowing their users to use the Internet at a fair price on their mobile. Well, it was only a concern that I raised, but Google's (and Apple's) move was brilliant: they showed that it is not impossible to change the rules. What I really mean is that both companies have their phones offered by network operators with a flat-rate data tariff (it's according to the agreement between the handset vendors and operators), which is really the way for free Internet usage.
As to NFC, I disagreed with the statement of one of my fellow champions, Paul Coulton, that 2008 would be the year for the rise of this technology. I now think that I was right in this question: this technology had so many challenges (let it be technical or political between banks and operators, for example) that 2008 would have been too early for the rise.
Touch - I have only seen the hype around Apple's new phone at the time of writing my previous prediction, but even the early signs were enough to predict that other manufacturers will try to copy Apple's success. I was right in this, but of course, having only this new feature is not enough for success, though obviously is a mandatory component in the recipe of success.
As for Java and that it would be becoming more popular again on mobile platforms, to be honest I can't see any measurable change today. Okay, Android development environment requires mostly this knowledge (not to mention Brew), however, this platform is yet too young to have significant influence on Java's success.
Awakening of North-America to smartphones: it DID happen. People on that continent has finally realized that there are other features that a mobile phone can offer, there are other services that they can use with their favourite gadget, and in general there is much more that they can do with their cell phone that they could ever imagine. And since North-America is in a very strong position when it comes to technology, the awakening of people living there will surely give a boost to innovation and further spread of smartphones.
Finally, I wrote that manufacturers who really think in big will not only sell phones, but also provide Internet services to users. This has also become true, although this will be a never-ending process currently with two-kinds of players: one that has already proven on service-front (e.g. Apple, Google) and the other which is already a recognized brand in mobile (e.g. Nokia).

What will happen in 2009?

Most importantly: the trend will continue for smartphones to become a commodity. Despite the financial crisis more and more people buy smartphones as they become more affordable (mostly due to binding contracts, though prices get lower, too) and once users get used to advanced features they'll be reluctant to give up using them.
As to advanced smartphones with binding contracts, the two newcomers, Apple and Google, managed to achieve that their devices are sold in a contract with flat-rate data tariff. The obvious effect of this is that users will use the internet much more and will be online for much longer.
More services will become available, their integration is a key factor for handset vendors (Nokia: Life Tools, Comes With Music, Mobile e-mail and mail on Ovi, etc.; iTunes & MobileMe for Apple; Zune for Microsoft; GMail, Calendar, Docs, etc. for Android-powered phones, etc.). Thanks to these services network operators will be in a worse position to fight for users who not only purchase phones and pay monthly subscription-fee, but also willing to pay for additional services.
Touch still rules with such innovative ideas as gloves, multiple devices to share their resources, etc. Even more, touch display will not remain a smartphone-only feature, but other devices in the lower-segments will also be equipped with it (e.g. Nokia's first feature phone on Chinese market: http://www.mobilemonday.net/news/nokia-announces-shows-chinese-touchscreen-phone).
3^rd-party apps and app stores: we'll see the introduction of new and re-newed application stores with client integration. Commercial software can be downloaded as well as freeware, revenue share will be more advantageous for developers than it's been so far. The fact that handset vendors are providing their application stores, too, will cause hard times for such independent players as Handango, for example. On the other hand, the obvious advantage of these regular providers will not really disappear: the variety of mobile handsets for which they offer content is much bigger than the coverage of any of the new stores will ever be.
NFC - it seems the time has come for this buzzword to become more popular. In last November, GSM Association called for Pay-Buy-Mobile handsets so that NFC technology be built into commercially available mobile handsets from mid-2009.
Android phones spread all over the world: we have already heard about the second handset that Kogan, an Australian company will ship this January, but rumours have been told about HTC, Huawei and other companies, too, that there will be other phones based on this platform.
Nokia finally to gain more market share in North-America thanks to AT&T for seeing lots of potential in Symbian to become the main smartphone OS in their portfolio
Use of mobile phones in new areas: Nokia Life Tools for users at the bottom of the pyramid (mid-range, low-end phones mainly), Nokia Home Control Center for advanced users who wish their smart home to be controlled by their smartphone, etc.
Transforming smartphone market shares: Motorola, Palm getting weaker (former betting on Android, latter introducing yet another proprietary system), RIM, Sony Ericsson "to survive" (RIM closed a surprisingly good 3th quarter in 2008; Sony Ericsson is also giving a try to Android), Apple getting strong (iPhone Nano in the queue), Samsung remaining strong (very innovative company challenging Nokia, the leader, all the time), although Nokia's position gets slightly weaker, it still remains the most dominant player (one of the most versatile players in this arena with lots of innovation in different areas of mobile space), Microsoft to struggle (has any one of you heard anything about them lately?).
Open-source model to gain ground - license-free handsets, free development environments, high inspiration for developers & tech companies to help each other, etc.
LTE - let's return to 4G and LTE next year, okay?
WiMAX - don't expect mass adoption of this technology in mobile phones yet (though pioneers have already appeared in 2008)
Mobile TV - the future is still foggy: which standard to follow (DVB-H or DVB-T?), will people buy this service at all, etc.

Did I miss something? Sure. Can you correct me in anything I wrote? Anything to add? Please do! Thanks!

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The diversity of Symbian development

2008-12-06T22:48:00.003+01:00

When talking about mobile software development lots of people forget about the fact that it's not only the native programming language that can be used on a given platform. I've read a lot of comparisons between Symbian/C++, Win32/MFC/.NET of Windows Mobile, Objective-C on iPhone, Android, etc. lately discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these options, maturity and popularity of the underlying platforms, probability of writing successful programs, etc.

The problem with these comparisons (in which Symbian/C++ is typically at the end of the list with its peculiarities and steep learning curve) is that they discuss only half of the picture. The more advanced a mobile platform the more you can do on it - which applies to software development, too. I strongly believe that one of the strengths of software development on Symbian platform is that it's not bound to a single programming language, SDK, etc. A lot of you might not know that for Symbian-powered devices you can write software in

Java - Mobile Java (JME) has been available since the early days,
Flash Lite - Adobe's Flash has been added to S60 phones 1-2 years ago,
Python - Python for S60 is an open source initiative enabling rapid application development,
Ruby - Ruby for Symbian is one of the newest additions to S60,
.NET - Red Five Labs's add-on to S60 platform is tempting Windows Mobile developers to use their skills on another platform,
NS Basic - Powerful development environment and run-time framework for programs written in BASIC (link),
HTML using other web technologies like CSS, Javascript - Apple's WebKit rendering engine is becoming the de facto standard for mobile browsers making them capable of showing full web pages (i.e. not only WAP or mobile web). This enables widgets development for a range of smartphones like S60-phones, iPhone, Android, etc.

You can see from the list above that Symbian development is much more than native application programming. On the contrary, I dare to claim that native programming is becoming less and less relevant over time. Of course, each option has its strengths and weaknesses (as well as native programming) the point is diversity, the possibility to choose. This (among others) makes Symbian OS's position stronger than its competitors': if you can develop for one mobile platform it's almost sure that you can use THAT knowledge for Symbian development, too. One exception for this might be Objective-C on iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised if that became a reality on Symbian in the near future, too.

By the way, Simon Judge made a quick comparison between different platform development options - it's worth a read. As well as Andreas Constantinou's post at Vision Mobile - a well-written article about mobile application runtimes for better understanding this world.

Any comments are welcome,

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Nokia should buy Yahoo?

2008-11-26T11:53:00.004+01:00

It's already known to most people that Yahoo! is in big financial trouble. Even worse, they were tried to be bought by a company (Microsoft) they didn't want to sell themselves to. They successfully fought against that attempt, however, their value was much higher at that time than what it is today. They were even "helped" to survive by a company that they normally call a competitor (Google). But this help didn't last long as Google was afraid of the consequences of a deeper relationship with Yahoo! (i.e. antitrust).

Now Yahoo! has an even bigger problem with much lower valuation. That, among others, inspired telecoms.com to speculate on whether it would be worth for Nokia to buy Yahoo!. Besides the fact that financially it would be a good deal for Nokia, they would even win a very popular brand (especially in the US!) for themselves. And all this along with that Yahoo! is very strong in (web) services would make their position much stronger against Google, Microsoft, Apple and the likes.

Putting aside the negligible fact that there's a world-wide financial crisis lately is this option not worth considering?

Tote

Update: El Reg reported that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo had answered this question during MWC 2008 saying 'no' to a possible acquisition of Yahoo!.

Mobile Monday in Hungary

2008-11-25T11:38:00.005+01:00

I don't know if you've ever heard of the event, Mobile Monday, but if you visit their site you can see that it's a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets.

Now it has finally arrived to Budapest, Hungary! I attended the very first event last evening and I was surprised to see how many people are involved and interested in mobility in this small country! It wasn't a very long event and there were only two presentations, but hey, it's the first one, right?

Actually I was interested in Torsti Tenhunen's presentation (Mobile Media – connecting and consuming everywhere) and was also wondering how many people have ever heard of Ovi, for example. Not too much as I could see in the audience. There was a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and since the audience didn't dare to ask anything (including me ... sigh), some people were randomly picked up to ask questions. I was picked up, too, and managed to ask a tough question. At least, even the presenter admitted that it was tough.

What was my question? Well, relating to Ovi I always wondered what Nokia's view on entering a competition with such big names as Apple and Google who have already proven in (web) services. My question was something like "How does Nokia intend to compete with those popular services that people have already got used to (iTunes and Google's bunch of services) and in general how do they see their position in the new devices + services setup where manufacturers are rolling out their own services, too"? Well, I admit that it's not a question that's easy to answer. As I mentioned even the presenter admitted that. Of course. I like to ask tough questions. Anyone can ask easy questions, but not so many people can point out things that are behind a presentation. This was the first full presentation that I saw about Ovi (of course, I had already known a lot of things about it beforehand) and although it was a new concept to most people I wanted to know more.

To be honest, my question was only partially answered. Some marketing hype was included in the answer (we're good at services, people will buy the idea, because they're gonna be very good, we have our brand name, etc.) in addition to pointing out the fact that Nokia has nice programs for emerging markets (think of Nokia Life Tools). This argument is valid, indeed, I've even already discussed about it lately. On the other hand, my addition to this list would have been something like:

the coverage of offerings these companies offer (including Nokia) varies and that gives users the freedom to pick up their choice of service provider,
Nokia plans to set up its own MVNO in Japan (read about the consequences and how it's supposed to affect e.g. Ovi here).

Anyway, I'm happy to attend upcoming MoMo events in Budapest in the hope of stiring up the "local" water. With unpleasant questions if necessary. :)

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NOKIA N96 - BRUCE LEE Edition :)

2008-11-24T14:26:00.002+01:00

I just love this video! :)

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Random thoughts on recent news

2008-11-06T14:28:00.004+01:00

Hi,

So many things have happened in mobile world recently that I can hardly cope with their sheer volume. This time I would just add my quick thoughts to some of them, one-line comments that I would like you to comment, too.

Let's start with VirusGuard Coming to Android Market in 2009: yeah, a clear disadvantage of full openness coupled with user-controlled security policy is that such a software is necessary. Remember that famous anti-virus software vendors also tried to gain a foothold on mobile phones based on Symbian OS, too? Unfortunately, Symbian's security mechanism works so well that there is no real demand for such software on these phones. Note: since Android Market is only for free software (yet), this commercial software can be purchased from Handango.

I've read two interesting reviews on the user experience of T-Mobile G1 and Nokia S60. In fact, these two were compared to each other. It was funny to read how two people with different needs could come up with contradictory results. Whilst Matthew from Darla Mack's blog found Contacts, Syncing, E-mail support and a "lot of other things" being superior on G1 he confirmed it too that there are many things that need improvement in upcoming Android-powered devices as well. Chris Walters from TheNokiaBlog, on the other hand, found just the opposite: he thought he could at last forget about S60 and can enjoy all the things Android can provide, but realized that S60 is still superior to Android in many aspects: build quality of device, camera, not being locked to any carriers, etc. There are two immediate conclusions I drew from these (and other) reviews:

Don't believe to any reviews, but make your own decision based on your own needs. For example, how would you decide based on these two reviews cited above when they both claimed that G1/S60 was superior to the other platform in Syncing?
Nokia had been the king of user experience on mobile phones until iPhone and G1 appeared on the horizon. The structure of menus, applications, settings, etc. were logical, consistent and compatible across a wide range of devices. It was engineering-driven so it couldn't be in any other way. Following an engineering-driven approach, however, is not enough anymore. In my opinion these companies could learn a lot from each other. It's not a sin (well, generally) to copy one's idea if that has proven whereas ours has not stood the test of time. The point is better user experience, which is better both for users and vendors.

The third thing I found worth being mentioned is Nokia Friend View. This beta software is similar to IYOUIT (for example) that I've already given a try to and liked much. I can see this kind of software being useful from another point of view (than what they advertise), too: I'm a family man and although my kids are small I know that the time will come quickly when I will let them hang around but still would like to know where they are. The wide-spread of such a software (and hardware!) will hopefully keep me relaxed in those times.

Finally, Nokia has made a very important announcement in the past week: they introduced Nokia Life Tools along with 7 new models under €100 price range. According to the press release, Nokia Life Tools is a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. Knowing that the opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid is huge, and handset manufacturers and network providers alike are working hard to fill it with phones (this time cited from PCWorld) it's no wonder why these new models can be purchased at never-seen prices. Nokia has finally entered the war fought for phone owners with thin wallets with the introduction of Ultra Cheap Phones.

Tote

Ridiculous strict control in Apple AppStore

2008-10-31T14:04:00.005+01:00

One of the most useful applications mobile users could ever use is Opera Mini. This freely downloadable tiny mobile browser relies on a remote server to do the "dirty job" and let the thin mobile client display the result and handle user interactions. It's available on most mobile phones, not only smartphones, but feature-phones, too.

But not on iPhone. As Unwired View reports Apple will never allow Opera Mini to be available in AppStore, because it would be a competitor to the built-in web browser (which performs very well, btw). What the hell? What kind of attitude is it? It's definitely not the one that drives innovation! Anyway, I have already heard it in the news that there were other applications that were rejected, too, due to competing with the features of built-in iPhone applications or not adding too much value to them. It's ridiculous all I can tell.

Anyone can see how does it compares to Android Market where anyone can upload any applications and it's the community that rates them - just like movies in YouTube. I'm not saying that such an openness cannot be dangerous sometimes (since no control means widespread of malware, too), but this tight control from the manufacturer side is not acceptable for me in the 21^st century. And I think it applies to most of us, too.

Tote

Update: Just read it on PCWorld that officially it's not confirmed that Apple would reject Opera's request for submitting Opera Mini to AppStore. In fact, the application hasn't been submitted yet. It's just so confusing to find out the truth from what different directors say ... :(

Update2: Rethink Wireless reported that there are some ISVs that are more equal than the others. For example, it seems that Google could gain access to some sensitive APIs that others didn't manage to. This makes Apple's situation even worse.

Carnival of the Mobilists, 146th Edition

2008-10-20T17:56:00.002+02:00

Hi all,

Thanks for including my article in the 146th Edition of CoM this week!

Tote

Transforming mobile industry

2008-10-02T02:08:00.029+02:00

I read the following quote from Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia CEO, in InformationWeek:

"The industry as whole is in the middle of a transformation, and it's a very exciting time," said Kallasvuo. "It's moving from a device industry to an experience industry, and we're making a conscious long-term effort to capitalize on that."

It is so true that it inspired me to write a summary on how things have changed in the "smarter" segment of mobile sector (read: smartphones) lately. Let me recap what was the situation in the near past and then talk about how things are changing recently.

In the classic device manufacturer - network operator - user triangle the roles were as follows (simplified version): user purchases mobile phone from network operator (or elsewhere) and uses those services that are primarily provided by the network operator. The manufacturer never gets any money after purchase and the user is often unhappy with the content/quality of provided (value-added) services.

This is now about to change. The two most important changes (as I see it) are that 1: the above triangle is "rectangularized" by an old/new member of the value chain, a separate content/service provider and 2: that device manufacturers such as Nokia and Apple OR operating system vendors such as Microsoft and Google want to get money after sales, too: they'd like to enter services business. As to point #1, not as if content providers hadn't been present so far, however, the means to access content and the capabilities of devices have not been ideal so far to say the least. As for point #2, there are two reasons why manufacturers would like to enter services business (take it over from operators?): first, there's a great demand from users to consume content that operators have not been good at providing and second, there's great money in it. Apple and Google are very good at providing services now they'd like to be involved in adding new means (i.e. phones) to accessing their services. Whereas Nokia and Microsoft are both in a strong position in smartphone market and naturally they'd like to get more money out of the whole business.

Another aspect in the new business model is whether or not shall mobile OS vendors require license fee for their software to be included in shipping devices. I'm talking about free and open-source mobile OSes, like mobile Linux. Although mobile Linux stacks have not gained so much popularity in the past years, they still do attract manufacturers wishing to lower their bill-of-materials (BOM). Google Android and the new Symbian (Foundation) OS are another two good examples for "license-fee-free software stacks" and Windows Mobile is for fee-based. iPhone's Mac OS X cannot be mentioned here, since Apple doesn't allow anyone to license their software stack, but make everything on their own.

How do mobile OS vendors pamper their developers?

Of course, with a free SDK to develop on. Most of them can be used only on Windows (except iPhone on Mac OS X), true emulation is available on Windows Mobile and iPhone, where development is done on the same platform as the target platform,
Free tools for development. Unfortunately not everything can be done with these tools, but you have to pay for their fee-based version should you need to use more advanced features (e.g. on-device debugging in Carbide.C++),
Signing your own installation package is mandatory for both iPhone and Nokia S60 phones, but not on Windows Mobile and Android. Latter advocates that the user is always capable of making proper decisions on security-related questions and it does not restrict the availability of 3rd-party applications by requiring signature. As Symbian's David Wood put it: let's see what operators will say on it.
As to developer support, old players are in the best position here: there's a great community support for Windows Mobile developers as well as materials to train themselves. The same is true for people who are developing for Nokia phones. Whereas the first non-beta Android SDK has just been introduced (you can imagine the level of support Google provides at such an early stage), not to mention Apple who wanted developers to sign an NDA that essentially prevents free information flow, writing books on development, etc. This has changed recently, since Apple finally scrapped their iPhone NDA and promised a new contract with less restrictions. Note: if Apple hadn't made this step they would have lost the majority of their developers.
Developers reward programs (MVP from Microsoft, Forum Nokia Champion program from Nokia), fee-based support for ISVs willing to pay for advanced services, webinars, trainings, books, etc.
Stores to capitalize on applications, themes, etc.

As to the stores mentioned above,

Apple's (in)famous App Store acts as a central distribution channel for 3rd-party applications. Unfortunately, Apple keeps this place under such a strict control that bitters lots of developers' life who simply don't understand why their programs can't be sold just because they're similar to the built-in applications. On the other hand, Apple keeps only 30% of revenue making App Store more compelling than lots of rival portals, such as Handango.
Having introduced T-Mobile G1 a few weeks ago, Google has also thought that it was a wise idea to create their own Android Market, a market place for downloading Android applications. What is surprising, though, is that Google is not planning to capitalize on sold applications, but expects mainly freebies to populate this place. It wouldn't be Handango if they didn't make the best out of this situation: why not use Handango to get some money for your Android app? It's also worth noting that Google, similarly to Apple, will be able to remove any 3rd-party applications (downloaded from Android Market) from Android-powered handsets if those applications turn out to violate developer distribution agreement.
Nokia already has their Software Market, however, things might change with the start of Symbian Foundation next year: as Antony Edwards from Symbian put it "[they're] pushing hard for a ensuring a zero, or a close as possible to zero, cost to the software vendor: so no cut of revenue for the Foundation".
Finally, Microsoft hasn't maintained their own single portal that ISVs could use for selling their 3rd-party applications, but people had to (and still have to!) use other providers. This article shows what one can conclude from job postings: with the coming of new devices based on Windows Mobile 7 a new portal, SkyMarket will also come in Q1 2009.

Nokia is very keen on transforming from being a device manufacturer to an "internet company". Their Ovi and Mosh are two examples of already launched services, which they just want to further improve with Instant Messaging (by buying OZ Communications) and Comes with Music. On the other hand, whilst strengthening their services portfolio they restructure their businesses so that they focus less on own product development (selling Nokia IntelliSync). Sometimes lowering the prices raises the revenue - wonder how the recent price cut will work out. It's especially important that since more and more people own Nokia devices, it increases after-sales revenue, too.

I've been already thinking on what Microsoft's reaction will be to open source and then found the answer: Steve Ballmer doesn't understand what's good in open source for Symbian and Google and anyway they won't get into handset business as long as they can make a lot of money from software only.

What they've started to work on lately, which you might have already heard of in the news, is 'Windows Cloud' OS. This idea is not new at all, however, it might affect the way how people use their mobile phones today: all you need is a portable device with a tiny display, some computing power and a good browser (you can call it 'smartphone') plus a good connection to the "cloud". Data, business logic, resource intensive heavy computation - all done on remote server(s) and you get only the result to your handset. I wrote 'this idea' was not new, however, what is new is Microsoft's patent on sharing device resources. Now this one is really new, but I don't know how much I can expect from it in real life - what it shows you, though, that it would be too early to write Microsoft off. Side-note: let me recommend you Ajit Jaokar's thought-provoking blog on how network operators could make use of cloud computing.

One more point to add to why M$ is not to enter the handset business today: HTC, designer & manufacturer of feature-rich phones, says that although they can see the potential in Android devices they do belive that Android and Windows Mobile complements each other.

As to Android, it's amazing to read about the ambitious plan to reach 4% US market share by the end of 2008. If that's so easy with a single device, a not perfect software and hardware AND suppose that they will achieve it - may I ask how on Earth Nokia could not do the same?

Anyway, I found a great analysis over at Telco 2.0 on the strategic impact of Google's first handset on the mobile industry. I especially liked the statements, such as "increasingly intense competition with new entrants who are willing to change the rules" and "the world in which handset manufacturers crammed the latest technology into devices simply for the sake of having the best specification sheet and operators flogged them to consumers on the basis of megapixels and memory is changing" and finally "it has been fascinating to watch ‘old school’ industry commentators pick apart the technicalities of the G1 spec sheet and Android platform, all the while forgeting to look at this announcement through the customer’s eyes".

Finally, some words about other members of the mobile industry whom we don't hear much about (well, at least I haven't lately).

Sony Ericsson has rationalised their R&D investment recently. This move, however, didn't prevent them from announcing a new run-time environment, called Capuchin, mixing Java ME and Adobe Flash Lite technologies. SE is eyed-up on Android, too, not only Windows Mobile (Xperia X1) and Symbian so this along with Capuchin will make their way to follow Nokia's approach by offering lots of alternatives for mobile software development.
Motorola is also interested in Android, so much that they are building-up a team of 350 people to develop on Android.
Samsung is not interested in anything else but manufacturing. This will not make their position stronger in today's competing market.

That's all for now about mobile industry news, thanks for reading so far!

All comments are welcome,

Tote

Samsung Mobile Innovator - Yet another Symbian developer site

2008-09-08T16:04:00.002+02:00

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.

Tote

Carnival of the Mobilists #138

2008-08-27T08:21:00.002+02:00

This week's CoM is hosted by Russell Buckley at MobHappy. It seems that another post of mine was worth being mentioned. :)

Cheers,

Tote

Silicon Valley doesn't respect Nokia

2008-08-20T18:17:00.006+02:00

In response to the article I found on Forbes.com, Nokia Software Problem, let me collect my remarks on the statements in a single post. The list of statements below simply follows the same order as they appeared in the original article.

"Nokia sells close to half of all smart phones worldwide"
Well, around 70% would be more accurate, but then it couldn't have been said that "close to half".

"N95's only edge was in watching video"
Hmm, let me smile at it. I think GPS, 5 megapixel camera, WiFi, etc. also come in handy every now and then. These things were all new in a Nokia device at the time when N95 was introduced and although Nokia might not have been the first in introducing them, the point is that video was not the only thing users could enjoy.

"Symbian is not dead, but it has a limited amount of time to act to capture developer mind share before it is too late,"
I don't know how many times I wrote this on various forums: developing for a Symbian-based device does NOT mean pure Symbian/C++ development. On the contrary, the range of possibilities is much wider: you can program in Flash (Lite), Java (Mobile), Python (for S60/UIQ), (Open) C, Widgets, .NET, NS Basic, etc. My question is not solely addressed to Apple: is there any other manufacturer in the world who can compete with this at this very moment? Is it the not-closed-but-not-too-open-either Apple who although enables Objective-C development, but nothing else? For example, Java, which is not only available on all other platforms, but also the primary language for 3d-party development on Android? Not as if I had heard too many good things on iPhone developer support, but are they really the ones who will save the world?

"Applications written for the iPhone, by contrast, will run on every iPhone."
Ehh, typically naive, beginner approach. I wouldn't write an article if I were such a beginner, though. How many iPhone models can we talk about at the moment? Two. There's a rumour on Apple introducing iPhone Nano still this year and I bet that that device would introduce variation both in hardware (e.g. screen size) and software. And having spent almost a decade with mobile software development, I can tell you that software development becomes exponentially more complex with the introduction of variations. I think we should get back to this question in 1-2 years time-frame and then we'll see how programs written for old models will work on new ones and vice versa.

"Carriers here have been loath to give Nokia much love over the years"
Yeah, this one is a hit on the nail. I find it very interesting how much North-American carriers favour US phone manufacturers (Palm, Microsoft, Apple) and Canadians (RIM). It is one of the root causes (if not THE) why Nokia has failed to successfully enter North-American market.

As to developing software for mobile platforms, it's worth noting that it's becoming more and more popular to rely on a thin client software responsible mainly for the User Interface, while storing data and implementing heavy business logic on a remote server. So often, the thin client is a browser or an application capable of providing "browser-like" behavior. This is something iPhone, the latest Nokia S60 phones, Windows Mobile are (and the newcomer Android will be) good at. And lots of people say that this architecture is the most suitable solution for cross-(mobile)platform software.

In my opinion, it's too early to talk about the dethronement of Nokia by Apple and RIM. Just count the number of phones sold, how many models various manufacturers have on market, how long has a manufacturer been on market, etc. and we'll have just the right amount of information ... to be silent. The author of the article fails to see that global market is not equal to American market, over-emphasizes the importance of Silicon Valley and can't think of the possibility that these platforms, devices, manufacturers can co-exist with one another.

Otherwise the article was good,

Tote :)

Carnival of the Mobilists #136

2008-08-11T13:17:00.003+02:00

This week's Carnival of Mobilists (#136) is hosted by All About iPhone.net. My post is also mentioned. :)

Tote

Brief status report about smartphone market, mid-2008

2008-08-07T15:22:00.007+02:00

Having followed the news of mobile industry in the past week, I thought it would be worth collecting some articles in a single post to see things from a bird's view, thus having a better overview on what's been going on lately on smartphone market.

RIM has been getting stronger in US market and Palm is unhappy with that. Although Palm's popularity had started to fall even before Apple entered mobile phone market, the new iPhone has just "helped" to boost the process. As to Apple, new countries have confirmed August launch enabling iPhone (3G) to gain bigger popularity and increasing its market share in other countries than US. In addition, the name of iPhone Nano has appeared again whispering words about the introduction of this device still this year. Apple is on its way to become stronger and stronger, but they're still in the "Other" segment of mobile devices according to ABI Research. And if Apple is making tsunami "from the bottom", Nokia is doing the same from the top with their price cut - I wouldn't like to be the stuffing in this sandwich.

It seems that we're living the time of foundations: this time it's LiMo that has picked up 11 new members to become stronger in the fight against Google OHA and Symbian Foundation. With the first LiMo handsets out, I wonder how they can catch up with industry leader Symbian, the also very powerful Windows Mobile and the likes. I did not mention Android deliberately, because to me it still exists only on "paper".

As to the creator of Windows Mobile, it's already well-known that Microsoft's Silverlight will come to S60. What is rumoured now, though, that Zune would also be available on Nokia devices. Zune clearly a competitor to Nokia's Ovi - will M$ and Nokia ever join their forces to fight against their newest pretender? I bet Apple will never open MobileMe to non-Mac device owners.

A new feature has been introduced on Ovi.com, namely file sharing, a fee-based storage option. Files on Ovi is a similar service to MobileMe's iDisk. As to MobileMe, the transition from .Mac to MobileMe was not as smooth as Apple had hoped. As Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, said "It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store". Well, although lots of people already think that Apple can only teach things to other players in mobile arena, I stronly believe that the opposite is also true.

Finally, let me recommend an article that well-deserved the title of post of the week at Carnival of Mobilists. The great post written by Andreas Constantinou from Vision Mobile was definitely a very useful foundation of this article.

Interesting times we're living,

Tote

Symbian and Nokia wrestling about voting rights?

2008-07-22T22:22:00.004+02:00

It's obvious that it's not in everybody's interest to let Nokia gain more control over Symbian - not the OS, but Foundation this time. It's a fact that Symbian was (or still is?) owned ~48% by Nokia. As part of the announcement of making Symbian OS open-source it also came to light that voting rights will be according to the number of Symbian Foundation-based mobile phones shipped. And since Nokia has shipped more than 70% of Symbian-powered devices so far, it puts them into a more powerful position than they've been before.

As I said it's obvious that not everybody likes it from those companies who are on the same ship with Nokia. The surprising bit is that even somebody at a power position at Symbian thinks this way AND make comments on this in public. John Forsyth said that he's "worried this asymmetry will mean the community doesn't grow in the appropriate way." His suggestions include "clean-room culture" and a one company-one vote system. Naturally Nokia won't accept latter after spending lots of money on Symbian - they made Symbian successful, they invested the most in it and now at the turning point of Symbian's life they'd like to take the opportunity to increase their influence on it, too.

Wonder what John thought about this when sharing his opinion in public. Perhaps we can read something about it in his blog in the future...

Tote

Static vs active application icons

2008-07-18T12:04:00.003+02:00

I found an interesting blog about mobile interaction design at Sender 11 (whatever that name means). The point of the article is that in order to make application icons more attractive and provide a better user-experience, the icons should refresh their content from time to time and show "relevant" information to the user instead of being passive and showing only static information.

I like the idea. As one of the comments says with Nokia S60s you can now build interfaces wiht live icons like these in web-run-time and create a whole menu as a widget. Well, I don't know much about widgets, but I can imagine that it would work. For example, the whole Application Shell could make use of Web run-time and show application entry points (i.e. icons) as widgets with their always-changing behavior. Even more, the idea of Active Idle could be replaced by an active Application Shell, too. Some pixels could also be saved from precious screen real-estate (e.g. unread messages) by letting the application icons show information.

What could different applications show to the user? Here's a by far incomplete list out of my mind:

Calendar: indication about events nearby
Messaging: unread messages (sms, e-mail, etc.)
Bluetooth connectivity: enabled vs disabled, transfer in progress
WLAN connectivity: enabled vs disabled, number of hotspots nearby
Maps: known (i.e. pre-recorded) locations nearby
Clock: time
Music Player: some information about tune being played (with scrolling, for example)
RSS reader: new, unread items
etc.

Could you add more?

Tote

Cross-platform development

2008-07-17T22:24:00.003+02:00

I've read a great article about multi-platorm development today. I've already been involved in the development of multi-platform solutions and I saw big sacrifices made for the sake of common codebase. Not all code could be shared this way, of course, there was thicker/thinner layer(s) on the top of common code. Generally the maintenance/improvement of common code was slower compared to one-platform-only cases and the code was less efficient, too. I was not convinced that it was worth doing it this way at all.

Having said this, I fully agree with the analysis above. I would add, though, that multi-platform development requires either highly-skilled developers with solid knowledge of each platform they're developing for or a team of developers writing code 1 man/platform with very good communication within the team. Either choice could be right or wrong depending on many factors, like complexity of solution, developer skills, proper specification, etc.

Btw, Simon Judge has also added his valuable remarks to this topic.

Cheers,

Tote

Collection of great materials on Symbian going open-source

2008-07-01T10:44:00.006+02:00

My regular readers may wonder why I've been silent on the great news of the mobile industry: Symbian is going open-source. The reason is simple: I was so shocked to hear it in the news that I just sat back watching the flood of new blogs and comments trying to digest this new information. But I've been digesting it, too. Other people whom I respect and think knowledgeable in this area have written their opinion and I'm now about to collect some of them in a blog and share it with you.

Andreas Constantinou from Vision Mobile was one of the fastests in commenting the news. He concluded that it was a logical move from Nokia (and Symbian, etc.) both from technical and business point of view:

" ... [Symbian] was crippled without control of the UI, application stack and the core OS under the same entity"
Eclipse (EPL) license is a weak one, which will make it desirable for OEMs to choose it.

He was also the first to point out that this move would cause lay-offs and some hard times for the following industry players:

SonyEricsson and Motorola: they will eventually have to give up with UIQ, since S60 will be the dominant UI and ecosystem and S60 will basically swallow both UIQ and MOAP(S).
Android's royalty-free, open source business model is not the only compelling alternative for OEMs, operators, etc. On the contrary, Symbian has already proved whereas Android has not yet.

Simon Judge over at Mobile Phone Development comments that " ... full access to the platform code allows for much more innovative applications using facilities that are currently hidden" and all this "only" for $1.500 is definitely a step forward.
He also cleverly notes that "Nokia and Symbian now see licensing the OS as a dead end" - I wonder what Microsoft will comment on it?
Finally, he raises his concerns on a technical question, backward compatibility: "... [the announcement] doesn’t explain whether this is source code, binary or application compatibility" - we wouldn't like to face with such a big break as what we did with the introduction of Platform Security, would we?

Mobile Opportunity's Michael Mace hails Nokia for their courage. He suspects, though, that "... the announcement is actually half cleanup and half power move: ... The power move is that it challenges Android ... The cleanup is that the ownership situation of Symbian was unstable and had to be changed eventually, and SonyEricsson clearly wanted to get out of the UIQ business".
He also asks what will drive Symbian developers after this change? While he believes that developers "respond to user excitement and the chance to make lots of money", he fails to see how the new Symbian strategy drives either one.
Finally, Michael points out that the longer it will take for Symbian Foundation to kick off, the bigger the advantage for Apple and Android. What about Microsoft? "This is Microsoft's ultimate open source nightmare, becoming real.

Rafe Blanford from AllAboutSymbian has written about Symbian Foundation unwrapped. He says that the tranformation of Symbian OS to a royalty-free, open-source system is according to today's industry philosophy and whilst it's a logical move forward it would not have been possible 10 years ago, since "...companies would have been unwilling to let Nokia or anyone else have such a dominant position". The new Symbian OS will challenge LiMo, Android and the likes on their own strength and "negates their key advantage". Apple's iPhone might be not affected, according to Rafe, since "it is difficult to see how Apple will expand to become a significant overall player in mobile space (rather than an individual niche player with lots of press attention)".

The hypothetical ("10 years old") problem Rafe was referring to is supported by The Register, too. They say, "the most damaging problem is that Symbian's licensees may have no desire to make Nokia stronger now that it owns the operation 100 per cent".
They also worry about that "the 'Foundation' may also prove to be an expensive liability for Nokia".
Finally they write that "it's largely Nokia that must be blamed for failing to make Symbian phones remotely 'enchanting' ..." and "... today it's the iPhone which has the enchantment factor. ... Symbian has done everything its original designers asked of it - a twenty year lifespan is not bad at all. But it's now Apple's business to lose."

Apple and world dominance. What about Microsoft? They're still bigger than Apple at least in terms of mobile OS market share, aren't they? Well, we've already got used to the style Microsoft comments similar announcements, thus it must not have come as a surprise that they have welcomed this move. To be more accurate, they have "welcomed the transformation of the Symbian mobile-phone platform into an open source project, because the software giant contends the change will create a host of new problems for the Symbian community." Sweet, isn't it? They use FUD referring mainly to the big 'F', fragmentation, saying that "there are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones".

Which might be true, actually. But don't lump Symbian and mobile Linux together. David Wood, EVP of Research at Symbian, has written a lengthy article about how he (and Symbian) sees this problem. He argues that 1: fragmentation really is a problem, 2: Symbian has the experience and ability to handle it. As opposed to Google, for example, says the side-note. :)

Finally, it's worth paying attention to Ajit Jaokar's article, who warns that "it is not possible to compare Symbian vs. Android; or Symbian vs. iPhone .. because it is not possible to mix operating systems with ecosystems". These are like "apples and oranges" in terms of "iPhone, Ovi and Android are ecosystems. In contrast, Symbian and Limo are operating systems or Operating system consortia". It's another lengthy article that is worth reading.

So I've been silent and haven't commented this news yet. Why? Because there are so many people to listen to ...

What about you?

Tote

Browser as an application platform

2008-06-18T20:08:00.008+02:00

I've read the following analysis from ARCchart with great interest. I'm already familiar with the idea of writing applications for mobile browsers and that it can be considered as a real alternative for mobile software development. WidSets and Widgets are all around us, not to mention Flash Lite, Silverlight, two cross-platform solutions used for delivering (multimedia) content to more and more people.

The main point of ARCchart's article was to point out that the whole problem of fragmented mobile development could be solved by developing to a single run-time environment: the browser. The browser, which is today's most widely used applications on desktop and mobile computing devices alike.

What is this fragmentation thing, one could ask? Well, let's have a quick look at various mobile platforms, development environments:

It's a known fact that Symbian/C++ opens the door to the wide variety of native features of S60 and UIQ devices, however, it still has a steep learning curve and its programming environment is not too developer-friendly, either, compared to e.g. Java. The vast majority of smartphones are running on Symbian operating system (whether iPhone-fans admit it or not), however, development is often more (cost-)efficient for other platforms. Portability is a serious issue in Symbian.
Windows Mobile devices are very popular in North-America, especially among business users. However, its popularity is way behind Symbian phones' anywhere else in the world and don't forget the fact that there are much more consumers than prosumers. On this platform, you can write native applications in Win32/MFC/.Net, however, these applications are rarely portable across other platforms.
Java? Hell, it's the king of fragmentation in terms of supported (or rather unsupported) features, so-called JSRs. Even though it was supposed to bring the Paradise to mobile software developers, it's still suffering from severe problems.
What else? Linux? Show me some popular Linux-powered phones first and how people are making cross-platform, backward compatible programs for them.
iPhone? Mac OS X with its Objective C just increases variation. Even though C++ can also be used for programming and there are, for example, attempts to port JME programs to Obj-C, as I said: it just increases variation, which is the nightmare of programers.
Android? Although the whole system is based on mobile Linux, the primary development language will be Java. But which Java? Google's own. And although it's said to be a solid foundation for Google OHA members, it's still only a recommendation for them to choose whether various features will be supported in their devices or not. You can imagine how it affects fragmentation in the Java world - it will just make it even more complex.

Now how does a browser come into play? I'm sure that most readers of this blog have already heard of WebKit, an open source browser engine enabling mobile browsers to show and handle full-web content. It is used in Mac OS X's Safari (iPhone browser), Nokia's S60 browser, the built-in browser of Google's Android will also be WebKit-based, not to mention Digia's @Web, a recently announced port of WebKit for UIQ phones. Although there are other good browsers, too, such as Opera Mobile and IE in Windows Mobile, WebKit seems to be becoming the de facto standard in mobile devices (which is not necessarily a bad thing). It's also worth mentioning Opera Mini and TeaShark at this point, two Java-based browsers, both using remote back-end servers for pre-processing full-web content and showing only the digested content formatted for resource-constrained devices. Side-note: it's also WebKit that is running on TeaShark's back-end servers. :)

So is ARCchart right or not? Is the browser the ultimate solution for mobile software development? In my opinion yes and no. They're right that mobile browsers and complementing technologies (such as Flash Lite) are becoming more and more powerful, capable of rendering extremely complex web pages, performing surprisingly smart functions, letting the user interact with active content, exchanging data with remote servers, etc. However, whilst "older" web technologies (e.g. JavaScript) are not powerful enough to compete with the power of real programming languages, newer ones (e.g. Flash Lite) have not been widely adopted yet. For example, for a quick and very brief reference as to what the different versions of Flash Lite can and cannot do, visit this link. And even though there's not too much variation here yet, there will be: newer versions of Flash Lite will require developers to keep track of which mobile phone supports which version, how to distinguish between Silverlight and Flash Lite applications, etc. I'm afraid it won't be any different in the end.

In my opinion, web-based technologies will open up new alternatives (they've already done so, actually) for mobile software: not necessarily too complex ones, but at least enjoyable. And this is exactly what most people are looking for: they'd like to enjoy using these programs. These new kind of programs that complete the whole picture, add to it, but will NOT replace yet older but still powerful technologies.

Can hardly wait for your comments,

Tote

iPhone for 1 Euro?

2008-06-17T00:00:00.004+02:00

Reuters reported that T-Mobile will sell Apple Inc's new iPhone for as little as 1 euro ($1.54) for the 8-gigabyte version together with a 69 euro monthly contract in Germany. I've already had a conversation in a Hungarian blog's post, in which people convinced me that the most important number most buyers look at is the entry fee that must be paid at the time of entering into a contract. Aftermath (i.e. how much it will eventually cost) is of less importance.

Could someone enlighten me why the (new, old - the same) iPhone makes people go crazy? Why do network operators contend for selling it? Besides the UI (which is very compelling & user-friendly, I admit), what else is in it that is not available in other high-end devices? What could Nokia and others learn from Apple so that people would fight for their devices, too? Or is this just another bubble that will explode when other phone manufacturers catch up soon?

Tote

Pay or not to pay for incoming calls and messages?

2008-06-16T22:28:00.003+02:00

Hi there,

This is going to be a short post. I was just amazed by the fact that the same topic was discussed in two different blogs coming to totally different conclusions. It inspired me to write about it briefly.

IntoMobile's (and also Nokia's) Stefan Constantinescu, an American blogger living in Finland, blamed Apple why they had started negotiations with network operators and why not tried to sell their handsets unlocked and unsubsidized. He explained why the "American model" sucked (people have to pay even for incoming calls and short messages, they're usually bound to contracts, there's big burocracy, etc.) and praised the freedom Europeans and basically the "Rest-of-the-world" enjoy.

On the other hand, it was shocking to read it from El Reg that an EU commissioner Viviane Reding would let mobile operators charge subscribers to receive calls". Back to stone-age, ehh? It's the very reason why Europe and some countries in Asia are ahead of the US in this area: the burden coming from having a SIM-card + mobile device is not as big here as in the US. American carriers demand too much from users (burocracy, long-term commitment, etc.) while provide too little (poor services, strongly controlled activities [in terms of used services, installable programs, etc.]). I think it would be a huge step back if this idea came true.

I promised that I would be short,

Tote :)

Nokia stirs water with mobile Linux

2008-05-21T23:01:00.004+02:00

It seems it's time for another round to discuss about whether Nokia will abandon Symbian OS in favour of (mobile) Linux. All About Symbian has reported that "Nokia's Chief Financial Officer said Nokia is considering manufacturing Linux-based mobile phones". This information is confirmed by Unwired View as well, although in a slightly different tone: they say "Nokia sees increasing role of Linux in handsets". Finally, El Reg is saying that "Nokia says no plan to switch phones to Linux".

Who to believe? Having read the comments carefully, people seems to have the following opinions/see the following options:

The biggest haters of Symbian say that it's natural that Linux will take over and this is exactly what they've always claimed.
According to a bit more careful opinion, these two mobile operating systems will co-exist. There are couple of arguments for this scenario:

Symbian/S60 is undoubtedly the leader in smartphone market
There's room for both OSes: Symbian excels in high-performance mobile phones, whereas Linux could be successful in mid-range feature phones.
Nokia has already heavily invested in the development of a mobile OS and is a nearly 50% shareholder of Symbian these days - why would they ruin all this?
The development of a smartphone running on Linux still takes a LOT of time.

Some more paranoid commenters say that "Linux is not really a threat for Symbian, but rather a motivation" to work & perform even better in today's extremely competing environment (i.e. mobile OSes and smartphone market). They believe that Nokia wants to make pressure on Symbian by announcing new Linux-powered devices from time to time.
Finally, there are those who don't give a sh.t to what OS is running on a phone, they "just" want their Flash/Python/Java/etc. applications (whether they wrote them or not) to run smoothly in the future, too. Some of these people also mention that it's the same if the OS gets replaced, the UI (i.e. S60) is what's important - and if it remains, nothing will change actually.

Personally, I think that Nokia is still making experiments with Linux. Don't forget that they already have mobile Linux devices (Internet tablets running on Maemo platform), though, those are not mobile phones, just sort of PDAs. In today's fragmented mobile Linux market, no one mobile manufacturers dare to commit themselves to take Linux as the leading operating system for their products - it would simply be way too risky. It's been also said numerous times that there are lots of factors that manufacturers must consider when selecting a mobile OS and Linux is definitely NOT the ultimate solution today. Nokia might abandon Symbian in the future, however, it's not time for that. Yet.

Any thoughts?

Tote

Mobile software development - Functional testing

2008-05-08T00:29:00.004+02:00

Simon Judge's blog made me think, again. He wrote about Mob4Hire, a company offering people for mobile application testing. Testers get paid via PayPal after bidding on projects (i.e. mobile applications/solutions) and developers get testers at a (hopefully) reasonable price. Finding testers might be especially useful if your geographic area is not the one you'd like your software to be tested in.

You know, lots of developers (dare to say: most?) do not recognize the importance of testing. This is the least pleasant part of development, I must admit, yet one of the most important. There are various kinds of testing including (but not limited to) unit-, regression, load, "smoke", etc. testing. The one, Mob4Hire provides solution to is called functional testing, where one can test the whole solution end-to-end. You know, mobile handsets are very-very fragmented in terms of platforms: applications can be developed in many programming languages like Java, Symbian C++, Windows Mobile Win32/C#, iPhone Obj-C, Linux C/C++, etc. And even when sticking to the same platform and programming environment, JME for example, the supported features vary very much from device to device. This, along with the complexity of what operators allow 3rd-party programs to do, makes it very difficult for a new application to be thoroughly tested.

Nokia already provides a free service for developers wishing to test their mobile applications written for Nokia S60 platform: it's called Nokia RDA (short for Remote Device Access). It is an Internet-based solution, where you can remote control a real mobile phone. You can request, for example, that SIM- and/or memory card be inserted in the test device as well as more than one phone be reserved for your test session to test peer-to-peer communications.

DeviceAnywhere provides a similar solution to Nokia RDA, however, it's not limited to a particular platform, nor to only 1-2 network operators. According to their web site, their service is "a revolutionary online service that provides access to hundreds of real handsets, on live worldwide networks, remotely over the Internet". Unfortunately, it is not free of charge.

Note that you cannot test everything with these solutions. For example, applications that use camera, GPS, accelerometer are basically out of question as well as ones using external accessories.

Another option for functional testing is making use of the services of Test Houses. Professional testers verify the quality of your software (compared to Mob4Hire, for example, see Simon's opinion) so that you can be sure you get the most what you paid for. Sometimes it's even required for your application to pass certain tests in order to get certified by some authorities. However, you may need to pay a lot for this service, see the list & pricing of Test Houses that Symbian Signed accepts, for example.

Finally, let's talk about community-driven testing. Once your application is in such a shape that it is ready for external people to play with it, you can ask them to go and use it extensively. You can offer free copies of the software to them, for example, or they may do it just for their own gratification - it's the same. This way of testing works extremely well in solutions based on client-server architecture with a mobile front-end and a server back-end. It's quite common in these scenarios that the mobile-end is just a light-weight client software that can be freely distributed, thus it doesn't cause any inconvenience if software distrubition is not strictly controlled. The point is that you may get lots of people playing with your software, because it's their passion. And passion drives people to do their job well, simply because they enjoy it, they love your program and they'd like it to be even better. I'm really a great supporter of this kind of testing. :)

Can you recommend any other way for performing functional mobile software testing? Please let me (us) know!

Tote

eyePhone - Your tourist guide

2008-05-06T16:15:00.003+02:00

I've stumbled upon this article recently and thought might be worth sharing with you.

If we put the name of this software aside a bit (it obviously tries to ride the waves of iPhone), the idea is great. Take a smartphone being able to

take good quality photos
use GPS
communicate over Internet

and you have your on-line tourist guide always at hand. It doesn't require too much from the handset, no? I bet even a good feature phone would do.

Of course, the client software shall not be too thick, most of the business logic is on server-side, right? An average (phone) camera quality should be enough, a Bluetooth-attached GPS is sufficient and basically every mobile phone can transmit data over the net lately. Okay, if an angle sensor is also part of the phone, then the client can gather more data that eventually makes recognition more accurate.

As opposed to the client-side, the server must be very intelligent. Image recognition can be very complex, since poor image resolution, distant objects, pictures taken from different angles, etc. can make it very-very tricky if not impossible. Yeah, I know that the article mentions that the concept was proved, but I believe it only when I see it, you know. Obviously, the solution must be community-driven - you cannot expect any service providers to maintain such a big database alone. And I'm sure that from business point of view it's the server-side software that one can license, whilst the client software would be available free of charge. At least, that would make sense.

Finally, it's very interesting that others are also making experiments in this area.

Android Scan is an application written for Android Developer Challenge that uses camera and mobile processing power for barcode recognition and scanning for metadata of CDs, DVDs, books on the internet.
Nokia also develops navigating system based on image recognition, where you can just "take a picture of a nearby landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, with the camera in your mobile phone. Then, Nokia will match your photo with other landmark photos in its mapping database, and tell you where you are."
J-MAGIC is a Japanese company that "sees market for picture-based search", too.

And the list is by far not complete. I wonder who will come up with the most innovative idea bundled with a sustainable revenue on the service so that both sides (i.e. consumers and providers) get what they want.

Any thoughts?

Tote

Symbian and Windows on the same device - what the hell?

2008-04-21T22:33:00.003+02:00

I've just finished knitting the brows after reading it in the news that IBM launches an initiative that has something to do with the mobile world. "It seems", I thought, "that there's so much money in mobile business that even the Big Blue could not resist".

But now I'm totally down on the floor with the idea of having more than one, potentially completely different, operating systems on the same device. I've just read that Motorola invests in VirtualLogix, Inc. whose "VirtualLogix VLX enables multiple operating system environments to run concurrently on shared hardware and provides a range of performance, fault tolerance and security options to address specific market requirements".

In my opinion, the whole solution abounds with challenges. Technically, from usability/business point of view, whatever. The thing is that each member of the value chain must learn/tackle something new. For example,

Device manufacturers must be prepared for having to integrate such hardware elements in the same device that enable multiple operating systems to run in parallel also considering the cost of virtualization (in terms of time, but money-wise, too). These pieces of hardware must give the best performance so that the user experience is constantly good on all platforms. For example, whilst a ~500MHz CPU performs well on a Windows Mobile-powered device, it's a dual 330MHz CPU that gives the same performance on an Nokia N95 8GB. Of course, this applies not only to the CPU, but to memory, persistent storage, etc., too. Thus, hardware costs will definitely be higher than for regular phones.
Of course, there will be a constant fight for giving the same performance as on a normal device and also keep the price of the device as low as possible. As to software vendors,

Writers of guest operating systems (each operating system will be guest, by the way) must prepare for a new challenge, namely that scarce system resources will become even busier and harder to get access to.
Some weird situations could also occur, for example, when a resident background application would be waiting for an incoming call, which would eventually be "stolen" by another virtual device with a higher priority.
In addition, it would result in a much better user experience if commonly used resources, such as persistent storage, were shared. For example, the file system:

One use case would be to allow the user to seamlessly move files between OSes.
Another to allow browser applications of the same type running on different platforms (e.g. based on WebKit on Android and S60) to share cookies, forms data, etc.
On the other hand, mobile OS vendors should be careful about what they would give access to: a secure platform cannot afford making a security hole by letting other platforms access sensitive shared files (such as DRM-protected content) unless a satisfactory level of protection is applied.

I'm not sure as to how network operators could be affected by the introduction of a multi-OS mobile device other than having to adjust something in their administration system. Oh yeah, a seamingly not so important question: branding should apply to ALL operating systems running on the same device. Anyway, I think these issues would be less important and easier to solve than the challenges described above.
Not necessarily a content provider issue, but it rather concerns the content consumer who would not like to pay for the same content twice in order to be able to use it on the same device, but on a different platform. For example, I wouldn't like to pay again for an MP3 music that I've already downloaded to my Windows Mobile device, but would like to listen to it now on my S60 phone (remember, we're talking about the same phone!).
Finally, the user: I think the experience, as such, would be new to the user. The feeling that she can choose which device she'd like to work with today. However, it's uncertain at what price this feeling would come: in terms of user experience, reliability, price of the device, etc.

Personally, I think it's not the right time to introduce such an advanced technology, not as if it was a question now. When smartphones are still often considered as a toy used by mobile geeks, when most people still want to use them only for voice calls and text messages, when enterprise infrastructures rely on/users committed to either Windows Mobile or Symbian, but not both - there is simply no business demand and serious reason to hurry. It must be a long-term plan, though I still wonder if/how/when it will work out.

My two cents,

Tote

True emulation for Symbian development - when?

2008-04-11T16:10:00.002+02:00

Though I've already heard that Windows Mobile SDK offers true phone emulation, however, only now have I got to the point that I ask for your opinion: why cannot we do the same during Symbian software development?

Note that you might have also heard that iPhone developers can also rely on this useful service. Nevertheless, don't forget to bear in mind that they must be working on the same platform, i.e. MacIntosh OSX. That is, there's not too much to emulate there.

But Windows Mobile is different: you develop on Windows presumably on an x86 architecture and produce binary code for another processor architecture (ARM) that you can even debug on. How? Why on Earth cannot we do the same?

Tote

Apple as an MVNO

2008-04-10T16:08:00.004+02:00

Very interesting patent from Apple (thanks to Unwired View), I wonder how it would work in practice.

Generally I can see it's a viable idea, however, also wondering how roaming charges can compete with any networks' own tariff. I understand that there would be a competition between available network operators, however, roaming charges still remain roaming charges.

Tote

Another hack for Symbian Platform Security

2008-03-09T19:53:00.010+01:00

One of my articles that has gained lots of attention was written about hacking Symbian Platform Security. Although it turned out that reproducing the workaround found by Symbiaali is laborous, requires strong technical knowledge and its wide-spread use is very unlikely, it clearly showed me that people were interested in this topic.

Today I found another post at Symbian Freak that describes just another way to turn Symbian operating system's well-known permission checking feature off. Although I don't agree with the title of the article (good-bye?? S60??), I think at least it's worth a few words.

What is this crack about? How can we cheat Platform Security capability checking so that it does not care if our program really has the capability being checked or not? Well, in a very special way:

Take a development environment for Symbian, like CodeWarrior Pro or Carbide.C++ Pro. Please note that you will need the ability of on-device debugging, that's why CodeWarrior Personal/Carbide.C++ Express is not enough. I'm unsure if Carbide.C++ Developer Edition was enough (this is between Express and Professional), but I doubt that. More on this later.
Prepare everything for on-device debugging (connect phone to PC, install MetroTRK to phone, etc.).
Start any program from within the development environment (aka IDE) in debug mode.
Change some bits in the kernel stack responsible for security enforcement. This is the most critical place, where you can really turn everything upside-down. And since you can do that, I believe it's Carbide.C++ Professional Edition that you need and not Developer - latter is less expensive, but in turn it provides only on-device application debugging in contrast with Pro's system debugging.
Voilà, we're done - we have access basically to anything.

Disadvantages

The crack is temporary, since everything is done in RAM.
Required tools are expensive: CW Pro was available at ~$1.700 (the product is discontinued and cannot be bought officially), Carbide.C++ Pro can be purchased for $1.300.
Break is limited to one device.
Proved to work only on Nokia N80, on other "hotter" devices (like the N95) it does not work or at least nobody has been able to make it work so far.

What kind of damage can a cracker still do?

Explore file system, discover what is stored where and how (as if you had AllFiles and/or TCB capability) and exploit it.
Access to DRM-protected content (as if you had DRM capability). This might be more dangerous as you can download e.g. DRMed music once and sell it multiple times later on.

To sum up this post, this new way of cheating Platform Security is the traditional way of cracking. I'm not surprised that it had been discovered and published, I just wonder why it has taken so long? And finally, I don't think that it would cause major problems in Symbian ecosystem.

What do you think?

Tote

iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

2008-03-08T13:21:00.004+01:00

I think it's a good idea to wait a bit with commenting the announement of big things. You might not be as fast as others, but at least will have a broader view to the whole picture. At least that's what I did with Steve Jobs' announcement about the iPhone SDK (official press release is here) and developer program. Having read lots of articles written about it (by writers faster than me:), my remarks are below.

App Store
This is the place, the only place, where people can download 3rd-party software from, let it be commercial or freeware.

Making it centralized is a good idea, better than having to look for something at lots of places. Especially if Apple undertakes lots of tasks, like distribution, advertising, content filtering, software update, etc. On the other hand, it will naturally result in that the control will be kept in one hand - it'll always be up to Apple to decide what is porn, illegal, etc. Is that good for us? Also, it doesn't help too much in pushing down the prices (I mean, interest rate) if there is only a single point of sell.
I've been already thinking about that reselling applications should be done by device vendors themselves in order to keep the price at a more bearable level than it is at now. For example, Handango's 40-50-60% is something I call unabashed. However, it's understandable that they keep interest rate at that high level: it's their main (only?) income. Whereas for device manufacturers it would not be. Okay, I understand that they've been trying to keep themselves away from this part of the business so far, but nowadays that Internet is everything and if you don't provide a service that your competitors do, then you lose. For example, Nokia now offers Mosh and Ovi, but I can't remember if they offer App Store-like service, too. If they don't, I'm sure they will soon.
One more thing: I think Apple is now bargaining. They announced a 30% interest rate from the price that developers will be able to sell their apps at, however, that's still too high. Never mind, let's check what people say about this rate, if the opposition is too big than we can offer less. From 30% you can do that.

Development
Apple announced that developers can download the SDK free of charge, bundled with source editor, debugger, interface builder (= UI designer), project management and integrated version control software and lots of other stuff.

However, doing that require paying $99. It's a one off cost and in fact sounds reasonable for "standard" developers ($299 for enterprise developers) - it's mostly for signing, though freeware app developers will also have to pay this fee - for traceability purposes. In this respect (i.e. traceability), it's similar to Java certification and Symbian's Platform Security.
Only platform is Mac? Sounds like a joke, look at the figures how many people/developers use this platform compared to Windows, Linux. I read it in Paul Todd's article that the SDK offers true simulation, not only emulation, which is fantastic. I wonder how VMWare would perform in iPhone development, though: people could install a virtual Mac machine on their operating system for development. Even more, it would make sense for Apple to create freely downloadable VMWare images for developers having everything pre-installed on it.
Let me talk about the programming language developers are supposed to use, Objective-C. To be honest, I don't "speak" this language, but I have seen code written in it. I've been in "cross-platform business" lately and having said that I can see this language being more useful to our efforts than Java, for example (since none of the popular mobile OSes are built on non-C/C++). On the other hand, I'm afraid that Obj-C is too far away from standard C and C++ and one would need to make too big efforts to keep the codebase as common as possible.
As for opening up 90% of APIs: it's nice, but a double-edged sword. First, Apple's got only one platform and one device (I mean, mobile phone). If everything goes fine with Apple's business there will be more platforms and more devices: the burden of SDK maintenance may grow to sky-high especially if you open up such a lot of APIs, taking care of source- and binary-compatibility, documentation, etc. You know, I would love to see Symbian/S60/UIQ to go open source or at least open up lots more APIs, too, but I understand why these companies decided not to do so. If Apple has the capacity to do it, then looking forward to it.
As to $100M VC fund for 3rd-party development: it's obvious that newcomers have to say big, like this (remember Android's Developer Challenge?), I'm just hoping that others will do the same. Even if they're not newcomers, "just" founders of this industry. :)
No multi-tasking: phew, it's really pain in the ... well, you know where. Although lots of things can be solved by storing state information when an application is forced to quit (heard that no 3rd-party app can run in the background! See Techcrunch for more details) and then retrieve that information on re-launch, this limitation causes lots of use cases not to work, like listening to incoming SMS, downloading/uploading/streaming content in the background, generally just hopping from one application to another where the soon-to-be-background app would still have things to do. I don't know why Apple has decided to introduce this limitation, but hope they will drop it soon.

In general, I'm happy that Apple has joined the mobile industry. As well as Google has or rather it just will. I always say that we can learn from anything, let it be good or bad. Life will prove that an idea or in particular an implementation of an idea is viable or not. The point is that we can all benefit from it: either by copying and making an idea better or avoid a mistake that has already been done once.

Tote

Google, the ultimate savior of mobile

2008-02-15T16:53:00.002+01:00

That's why I like Russel Beattie. Definitely the post of the week for me. :)

Tote

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

2008-01-28T13:09:00.000+01:00

Of course, I read the press release from Nokia. I even noticed that my fellow FN Champion, Paul Todd, was faster than me to write about it. Never mind, I knew it in advance that I can't be faster than AAS, nor Simon Judge, either.

What comes as a surprise to me, though, that no-one has pointed out to an important aspect of this announcement: am I alone to think that this is Nokia's answer to Google OHA?

Nokia already had a mobile Linux platform, called Maemo, but with this $153M acquisition it has now joined LiMo, too. See brief comparison between LiMo and OHA here. It's interesting to see how mobile phone manufacturers are committing themselves to different "open" mobile operating systems (e.g. Nokia to Symbian/S60, Maemo, LiMo; Motorola to LiMo, OHA, Symbian/UIQ) just to find the ultimate revenue source. If there is such, since who said that multiple mobile OSes cannot happily co-exist? Anyway, for us, developers, it might easily become the ultimate hell.

Tote

Touch(less) UI + Accelerometer

2008-01-12T23:26:00.000+01:00

We all know iPhone. Even though it's not available in Hungary as of yet, I've already had the chance to hold it in my hands and play with it. It's simply great. People say that it's because of the touch UI, but I don't believe that. It's not that simple. Lots of other manufacturers have already made phones with touch support, but for some reason the success of their products is not even comparable with iPhone's. I think it's because of Apple's approach to user interface, more importantly to user experience. They made it as simple as possible and it will be very hard for phone vendors to compete with it.

Motorola announced their ROKR E8 phone at CES 2008. It's a touch-driven phone, needless to say. The coolest feature that I found is that it doesn't have a physical keyboard, but it dynamically shows always the relevant keys based on what feature/program is being used at the moment. I remember of a patent that I have read about over at IntoMobile: Nokia had patented their invention of a dual-screen phone with touch support. My first reaction to seeing the drawing from the patent that the keyboard layout could be displayed on one of the screens and it could be dynamic: sometimes QWERTY, sometimes ITU-T, sometimes something else, something relevant. I'm very happy to see it to come true.

You might have already heard about that Nokia was planning to add tactile feedback support to their future phones, which means a little buzz when user presses one area of the (touch)screen. Very interestingly very similar to what Motorola has just come up with. You know, one of the biggest constraints of using a mobile phone instead of e.g. a laptop is screen size. And the size of the screen has so far been limited 1: by the device size (it must fit into one's pocket), 2: it had to have a keyboard. It seems that the trend for 2008 is that there will be no keyboard on smartphones at all. Ehm, I mean no real, physical keyboard - as opposed to virtual.

Have you heard that Nokia recently submitted another patent application for touchless UI? See Unwired View for more details. The basic idea described in the patent is that there would be sensors arrayed around the perimeter of the device capable of sensing finger movements in 3-D space. The user could use her fingers similarly to a touch phone, but actually without having to touch the screen. That's cool, isn't it? I think the idea is not only great, because user input will not be limited to 2-D anymore, but that I can use my thick, dirty, bandaged, etc. fingers as well (as opposed to "plain" touch UI). I'm a bit sceptic, though, how accurate it can be, whether the software will have AI or the user will have to learn how to move her fingers. We'll see hopefully very soon!

Finally, there is one more thing I'd like to mention here. It's the built-in accelerometer. I'm pretty sure that most readers have already heard of that the newest Nokia smartphones have built-in accelerometer. It's sort of a motion sensor that actually hasn't got so much publicity so far. I was always wondering why Nokia has not announced, advertised, etc. this piece of gadget. I mean at all. I can't remember if I have ever read any articles, blogs, etc. from Nokia about that they have put this extra hardware in their phone. You know, an accelerometer in a mobile phone is unusal. Not only to me, but to other people as well.

Why did Nokia not advertise this? If it's expensive, it doesn't make any sense not to advertise it. If it's cheap (I bet it is), then it doesn't have to be advertised, but then why add it to the phone at all? Just to see what the (developer) community thinks about it? What kind of applications can they make out of it? Although it's a good idea, I don't think it's a valid business reason. And you know, it was also unusual that Nokia published an API for developers to use this feature - but it was an R&D API! Knowing Nokia and using their SDKs for ages, I would say it's, again, very unusual. It's like "Let's publish this API so that we can see what others can find out with it, but doing it so that we don't have to announce it".

I wouldn't be suprised if the accelerometer eventually had something to do with the touchless UI. I have the feeling, since I'm a programmer, that even with the array of transducers (see the patent) it's not trivial to figure out what the user has done with her fingers. For example, it might be very important to know in what angle the user's hand is to the device ... and this is the point where the accelerometer comes in handy. It helps to know how the user's one hand holds the phone while making gestures with the other. And this altogether is the new thing.

Can't wait to read your comments,

Tote

Predictions for smartphone industry in 2008

2008-01-02T23:54:00.000+01:00

I've read the recent blog of my fellow Forum Nokia Champion, Paul Coulton, with great interest. Similarly to Paul, I'm not an experienced fortuneteller, but after reading his article I thought I would give it a try, too. You know, what can I lose other than being not right? :)

Let me comment some of his findings, first. Although I can't foretell how ad-driven content will work out in mobile space (since it's simply not trivial how to advertise on mobile devices), I can say the biggest supporter of this model (their name starts with G if somebody didn't know) largely depends on operators' support. If operators (aka carriers) do not make it cheaper for customers to download data from the Internet than it is today, then the success of this model is very questionable. And actually this mostly applies to widgets as well: although they can work with local data, too, the most popular use case of widgets will still involve transferring data over the net.

As to NFC (short for Near Field Communication), although I strongly believe in the future of this technology, it's still in its infancy and I don't think 2008 would bring the break-through in this area. NFC-enabled mobile devices might appear in people's hands in 2008, however, it would only be one part of a larger ecosystem: the wide-spread use of RFID tags in various places (movie posters, business cards, etc.) + the introduction of accompanying services (such as a bus ticketing service) will still be the question of later years. I think.

Paul's list could be completed by the following things in my opinion:

Touch UI: it's a MUST HAVE feature for every serious phone manufacturer in 2008. We have seen lots of patents from various manufacturers that had something to do with screens, how they will look like and we can guess how they will work. There's already lots of effort put into working out the ultimate touch-based user interface and the success of iPhone has already shown us that it's not something in vain.
Java: the language and its development environment will be more and more popular again thanks to the introduction of Google-phones. As we all know, the programming language and libraries used in Google's public SDK is not Java (neither ME, nor SE), but something else that allows Java developer to re-use their existing knowledge in a slightly different environment. Anyway, I believe Java will only profit from this thing.
Awakening of (North-)America to the world of smartphones thanks to iPhone + gPhone. It seems that American companies can convince American people more easily that they need smartphones. And you know the reason why Nokia is happy seeing the huge success of iPhone? That's why.
Most innovative players in mobile phone industry (Nokia, Apple, Google, others?) will introduce their internet services designed for (their) mobile phones. Google is an internet company and just about to enter the mobile market (700 MHz frequency auction, gPhone, etc.). Apple has had very popular internet services (e.g. iTunes) for years by now and they now feel the taste of success on mobile area as well. Nokia has always been a mobile company, but they've decided to open to internet services and have already introduced a few popular services (MOSH, Ovi, etc.). Why do they do this? Because pulling money out of customers' pocket once (i.e. when they purchase mobile phones) is not enough - why not getting more money from them? Who will suck from this? Of course, the operators. I would even call it "double-suck", since not only will they suck thanks to people using e.g. VoIP over WiFi (in other words, not using operators' network), but they will suck because people will turn to internet services provided by others (e.g. Nokia, Apple), not their operators.

I'm sure that I've missed a few things that could have been added to the list. Could you help me?

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Smartphone OS market share in 2007

2007-12-07T08:20:00.000+01:00

I'm a big fan of Simon Judge's blog, Mobile Phone Development, and I read his article about Q3/2007 Smartphone Market Share with great interest. I agree with his findings, however, I would add my own thoughts to it, too.

I found it very interesting that most people might not noticed without paying careful attention to the details, that there are already more smartphones running Linux than Windows. It was surprising for me to see that as I've sort of had the impression so far that even though mobile Linux has its potentials, it still hasn't gained much market share as of yet. Well, I was wrong.

The next thing worth noting with regards to mobile Linux that almost a quarter of the whole report is about explaining why mobile Linux would be a bad alternative for manufacturers, operators, etc. Surprisingly, considering costs as well. That, of course, shows what Symbian really thinks about this threat.

As to Windows Mobile: I've also read a couple of reports, where analysts predicted that Microsoft would take over the lead role as mobile OS vendor from Symbian by 2010, but I also believe that it's unrealistic. Although I recall a question I was asked informally by someone in London, where I attended Forum Nokia Developer Day this October, that what I was thinking about the competition between Microsoft and Symbian. I asked back: is there any competition? This might sound as a joke and now I think that I was too self-confident: although Microsoft might not pose a big risk to Symbian as of yet, it's still a key player that's just getting stronger over time.

I've just read it at over IntoMobile that iPhone outsells e.g. Nokia N95 in Europe. Well, although it's a BIG warning sign, let's not forget about that Nokia

has a bit more phone models than Apple (ehm, 1?)
is going to introduce new phones with touch ui support (also with tactile feedback!) in 2008
also very importantly is working very hard on providing internet services (Ovi, MOSH, Music Store) to increase customer loyalty. Similarly to Apple, by the way.

Finally, some notes on mobile OS market share in the US:

There are two vendors who have much bigger share here, than all around the world: Microsoft and Palm. Their cases are pretty much different, though: whilst Palm will potentially disappear from the (rest of the) market in the not-too-far future, Windows Mobile is predicted to gain bigger share from year to year.
However, it's not only these two players among whom the market is split. Or at least will be soon. Apple has just jumped in to this business with great initial success. Although selling pretty well in Q3/07 is something remarkable, they still need some time and stable growth to catch up.
Symbian fills a marginal role in this part of the world, but as we all know Nokia and Sony Ericsson are both working hard to change the situation. Nokia has, for example, just teamed up with Verizon (ehm, it was Verizon who joined Nokia, actually) for developing a fourth generation mobile broadband network. I believe a successful co-operation with a big American carrier is the first step for Nokia to gain a foothold in US. Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, has sold 50% of their share in UIQ (a company, but also the name of a Symbian variant) to Motorola. Even though Motorola is said to be fighting for survival, they're still a key player whose help might always come in handy.
Finally, what is not in the figures is OHA: although they're still nothing more than a promising alternative now, the first phones based on Android will appear during next year - I wonder if they will be able to make as a good start as Apple did.

Your thoughts are welcome - as always!

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Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote

2007-11-15T13:57:00.000+01:00

Have you ever felt that your idea is stolen and "Damn, I wish I had been faster in doing it"? Now I feel exactly that way.

The first time I heard that another Nokia phone, N95, has a built-in accelerometer I started wondering why on Earth? Why on Earth is it worth for Nokia to put such a device in their phone? Has Nokia 5500 Sport (first Nokia device with built-in accelerometer) proven that it's worth making further experiments with? I haven't seen any analysis telling so, although I admit that it doesn't mean anything. Why on Earth has Nokia kept it secret that there was such a gadget in their hottest device? Is it a secret? Isn't it something that makes the device even cooler?

Then I started to think about what we could do with it? First, I thought RotateMe was a great software, I really liked the idea. But I felt something was missing. Then I found it: why not simulate joystick key presses (i.e. left, right, up, down + press) by tilting the device to the right direction? Since it's fairly easy to simulate key events in Symbian C++ just as if they had really occured, I thought it was easy to implement. The good thing in this idea that it works with existing software, no need to re-write or adapt anything: applications will not notice the difference between real keystroke and simulated.

Tilt-O-Mania

That would have been the name of my software. R.I.P. Now it's called Nokmote and it's not mine at all. :( Sorry guys behind the "sad smiley", I'm happy that you'll come out with an implementation, but I must tell you that I'm unhappy that you'll come out with it. :)

To be honest, I was always wondering why nobody had ever discovered the opportunity in writing such a software. As more and more S60 devices will come out with built-in accelerometer this feature could become such an integral part of user experience that even Nokia might want to use it. I dare to claim that even the joystick could be replaced by the accelerometer + this solution in the future. Not only could Nokia save some money by removing some existing hardware (i.e. the joystick), but they might even be able to use the new spare space for other purposes. Isn't it so cool?

And you know what? The solution is not Nokia/Symbian specific: any (mobile) device having a motion sensor could do on-screen navigation like this. Another Symbian phone, iPhone, gPhone even a laptop, though it would be funny to see a businessman tilting his computer at the airport just for the sake of navigation. :)

On the other hand, I was shocked to find that my(?) idea was not original at all. I mean not that now somebody has come out with an implementation for S60, but this idea was implemented years(!) ago on another mobile phone. You know, some of my colleagues have worked with a MyOrigo device and when I told them my idea they enlightened me that it had already been implemented. Check out this article from The Register and you'll see that such a device is already on the market. Okay, it is a not-really-famous mobile phone and perhaps it doesn't even make use of accelerometer data, but still the idea is theirs: user tilts software navigates.

Never mind, although I'm sorry to see that I can't be THE pioneer in this area, I'm happy to see that it'll be available to us soon. Good luck for writing the software!

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Android SDK is out - first impressions

2007-11-13T02:16:00.000+01:00

After watching the video about the introduction of Android for developers, I'm convinced that the new phone will generally be as useful and user-friendly as e.g. the-also-newcomer iPhone. Well, it came as no surprise to me, I'm just expecting a lot of innovation from the new player in mobile space. I don't expect that the new platform will offer as many features as traditional Symbian-powered devices and I can even dare to say that it's not going to be as stable, either ... yet. However, I'm pretty sure that they will catch up soon and offer real alternatives for users, phone manufacturers, operators, etc.

What has totally escaped my attention, though, was that the programming language for this platform would be Java. Based on the fact that it's going to be a Linux-based OS I kind of anticipated that the programming language would be C/C++. I don't know the rationale behind this decision, but it will definitely give a boost to the otherwise stagnating JME programming environment.

I wonder, though, how Google is planning to solve the infamous Java fragmantation problem for mobile phones. What is that? Well, even though Java is a very popular and platform-independent (aka portable) programming language, it's just the set of Java core services that is available on every mobile device. The presence of additional features, such as advanced mobile graphics, security, etc. depend on phone manufacturers' decision, whether it's worth adding them. Which makes Java mobile applications market very fragmanted (some features are available, some are not) and development very frustrating. You know, I have heard an example that a mobile Java game programmer had to make 100(!) variants of his game "just" to be able to distribute it to as many phones as possible.

Another thing about mobile Java development is that most mobile phones are running on another operating system than Java. In fact, Java is not an operating system at all, even though there have been attempts to make Java-based mobile platforms, see e.g. SaveJe for more details. But Symbian OS is similar to Android platform in that they both have their native platform (Symbian OS and Linux, respectively) meaning that platform features are usually available in native programming language first and then some JNI layer added on the top and there you are, it's ready for Java programmers. So far so good. However, it introduces some latency in the equation as it requires some time to write features in native environment first and wrap it in the second round. Will Android suffer from the same problem?

My regular readers already know that I was involved in S60 Browser development and it was very challenging and I really liked it. For that reason, I'm happy to see that Google chose WebKit for their mobile browser (S60 Browser is also based on this rendering engine) and in the demonstration it worked well. I was wondering which display method they would choose for web pages:

S60 approach that displays the web page in its entirety without scaling
or iPhone approach that scales down the web page to so that it fits to display dimensions, though it's hardly readable, but lets the user zoom it very conveniently (e.g. by double-tapping on screen)

They actually chose both: they first display the page without scaling and then user can scale it down for better navigation. I'm pretty sure that Nokia has their own IPR on MiniMap (i.e. the zooming interface) so that might be one of the reasons why Google didn't choose that option. However, what surprised me that they use the same visual history for page navigation as in S60 Browser.

So these are my first impressions after spending half an hour with Android after midnight. I'm really keen to hear your comments - just as usual! :)

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[Update]: I'm shocked, check this out: Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun's IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME. It basically says that Android phones will NOT be JME-powered, but you can write JSE programs to them. With Android, Google has introduced their own VM, Dalvik, which eventually does not make use of Java bytecode, but their own Dalvik format. It's all to get rid of Sun being involved in licensing.
It's another question how good or bad will it be to the community. It means a new variant on the horizon, a VM incapable of running so-far-standard Java bytecode, thus your midlets will have to be re-compiled. I can see why Google is happy to have their own solution to this problem, but I can also see why developers would be unhappy due to that they'll have to take just another Java variant into consideration. Even if their pockets will be full with (Google's) money.

Join Forum Nokia LaunchPad - 25% discount

2007-11-03T23:40:00.000+01:00

Nokia is famous and well-known of their developer support. Forum Nokia is a portal for anybody interested in tools, documents, techniques and insights to developing solutions running on Nokia devices. The recently renewed site now contains a very popular community-driven forum, Wiki, blog, etc. for everybody's use. All this for free.

However, sometimes even this extensive support proves to be not enough. There are cases when you need more information from a more reliable source in shorter time. In other words, more support. And this is when professional support comes into play. Something that you don't get for free, something you have to pay for.

What is this professional support and what do you get for your money?

Whilst there are many kinds of professional support provided by Nokia, I'd like to talk about two of them: Forum Nokia PRO and Forum Nokia LaunchPad. I'm pretty sure that you have already heard of Forum Nokia PRO, available for professionals for years by now. The benefits of this program is well-described here, it's worth noting that it is invitation only. As opposed to Forum Nokia LaunchPad, which is available for everybody, individuals and companies alike. Benefits include free copy of Carbide tool, discounted tech support, application signing, books, early access to technical information and lots more. Although there is a clear difference between services provided for PRO and LaunchPad members (former naturally gets more), I believe it's worth joining either program if you're a serious developer/company.

And here comes the deal

As a Forum Nokia Blogger and "self-appointed LaunchPad ambassador" I am entitled to offer you €200 off the price of Forum Nokia LaunchPad's (otherwise) €800 membership fee. Yes, that is 25% discount! If you have been thinking about getting more from Nokia and joining LaunchPad program, this is the right time to do it!

How does it work?

I give you a promotion code, namely LP600 (short for LaunchPad for €600), that you can use when applying for Forum Nokia LaunchPad membership and that's it! You just need to enter the above code (in Promotional code field) right before pressing Submit and you're done, you pay less.

Convinced or eager to know more? Just visit Forum Nokia LaunchPad for more information and apply for membership!

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Symbian Platform Security - hacked?

2007-10-27T01:09:00.000+02:00

Well, 3:00am has already passed and I'm tired and sleepy. One thing doesn't let me sleep, though. I've just stumbled upon these articles (Exploring S60 with AllFiles and Goodbye S60 Platform Security, Hello CAPABILITIES!) and I can't believe my eyes: Platform Security hacked?!

Briefly, the solution is as follows:

Take a firmware update package (currently supported only by Nokia for their S60 phones).
Edit a well-isolated part of it, where all those capabilities (i.e. rights) are listed that a user can grant to a 3^rd party application upon installation. Remove existing capabilities, add new ones, whatever.
Flash it.

Now you have such a phone (software) that allows you to give so powerful rights to any 3^rd party application that they can do basically anything on the device. For example, your program can access DRM-protected content (you've downloaded it once and share it with others), browse other applications' secret folders, etc. You just need to

Extract a signed SIS (Symbian Installation) file
Add rights to it (whatever gives them more power)
Re-pack & sign it again
And install it
Although the Software Installer will notice that the application was not properly signed (== acquires for more capabilities than it can normally have), the user will be in such a position that he can grant those extra rights.

Actually, this is the approach that the author of the aforementioned articles followed with regards to a very popular file browser application: he added AllFiles capability to the program so that he could explore the entire file system, which he hadn't been able to do until then.

Unfortunately, I can't prove or disprove whether this solution really works, since I haven't even updated my N95's firmware yet (shame on me!). However, this guy seems to know what he was talking about and I sort of a believe him.

In any case, if what he wrote happens to be true, then I have a few questions:

Why on earth did Symbian publish such a confidential information that is useful solely for phone manufacturers? You know, the documentation of Software Installation Policy is a very internal thing, not anyone's business. You can see that it's enough if one talented person stumbles upon that documentation and uses it.
Why is a firmware package in such a format that anyone can edit it? I mean, locally on their machine. Okay, with such a low-level tool that very few people are familiar with, but it's still possible. Wouldn't it have made more sense to encrypt and sign the package so that

it cannot be decrypted by 3^rd parties (well, easily at least)

it gets decrypted only on the target device right before flashing?

You know, I'm not a security expert, so I might easily be suggesting a stupid thing, but if there's any chance to do it that way, I think it's definitely worth the effort.

But even if it's not viable, then why does the firmware package update the whole system including the most critical parts? You could see that one can change the software installation policy this way. Why not make a process consisting of two steps:

User can download and flash a firmware package that updates the (vast) majority of the system, but it doesn't allow him to touch the critical parts
Those critical parts can either NOT be updated at all or only at service points.

I just really don't know what I've expected from Platform Security, but I have a feeling that in my secret dreams I thought it was unbreakable (I know, I'm naive). Again, I'm still looking for confirmation as to whether this solution really works, but I'm afraid that I already feel the bitter taste in my mouth. You know, a system that Symbian is proud of, operators love (some developers hate:) and even competitors acknowledge shall not be attackable and even if a security hole is discovered it shall be closed quickly without any major impacts. Nevertheless, I think this problem can be solved - hopefully very easily. But as to injecting the fixed version on to old phones, it will just take another firmware update. :)

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Update: another fellow Forum Nokia Champion of mine, Antony Pranata, wrote an article about the very same topic. I think it completes my post in addition to confirming that the solution works. Worth reading.

Symbian development - An alternative to embedding applications

2007-10-20T14:37:00.000+02:00

I usually don't write articles about actual Symbian development issues, but this time I think I make an exception, if you don't mind. If you don't speak "Symbianish" or simply are not interested, then please skip the rest of my post. Nevertheless, I hope that the majority of you will just keep on.

I was in London on last Sunday for Nokia Developer Day. I was invited, because I'm a Forum Nokia Champion. There was an interesting presentation about Location Based Services and some technical details were revealed as to what Nokia would come out with as part of their upcoming SDK, namely S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. It's not secret that they're going publish Map and Navigation API and an important feature of that API is the ability of launching Maps application stand-alone or embedded.

If you speak Symbianish, then you should know what launching an application in embedded mode means: your application loses focus and hands it over to the embedded application so that you have no control over it as long as that application owns the focus. It's worth noting, though, that albeit your application has lost focus it's still the main (hosting in other words) application that just makes use of services provided by another application. This can be seen by having a look at the list of currently running applications, where it's the name of your application that is in the list and not the one you have embedded.

The advantage of launching an application embedded in your application is that you don't have to bother with how it works internally, you just start it up and basically rely on that it works properly. On the other hand, this way of using other applications' services has disadvantages, too: one is that you have no influence on the menu structure of the embedded application.

Why is that important? Well, a real use case that we had to implement recently is that an application 1: shall be able to show some points-of-interest (POIs) on a map and 2:
shall have its own menu structure. We were happy to hear that Map and Navigation API would be available for public use, however, launching Maps application to satisfy our first requirement would mean that we would not be able to satisfy the second.

Then I started wondering how it could be done. Since I was deeply involved in the development of S60 Browser application some time ago, I know quite a lot about the application and the ecosystem around it. For example, I knew that a new approach had been introduced as part of the "Browser-offering" ~2 years ago that allows an application developer to use a (CCoeControl-based) control in her application. That control is called Browser Control (its API is BrowserControl API) and basically it is capable of showing & handling a web page just as the built-in Browser application does. So essentially your application can have its own menu structure, whilst also being able to show a web page. It gives you more flexibility and freedom if you use this API in favor of launching Browser in embedded mode, however, it's also more complex - sometimes unnecessarily.

Finally, we reached the point of my article: wouldn't it make more sense for applications that can be embedded (since not each application can be embedded) to offer such a (CCoe)control-based solution as well? For example, if the newly announced Maps and Navigation framework published such a service, then I shouldn't be worried about how to solve my problem. But this question is more general than to narrow it down to this special use case. I think, if some architects and/or lead designers from Nokia read my article, then I suggest them to think about it.

As a last thought, you might be wondering how I'm gonna work out this problem eventually. Well, there happened to be another presentation on that very day (i.e. Sunday) about Web Widget development on S60. I'm just thinking about writing an S60 widget that makes use of Google Maps API so that everyone is happy. :)

Any comments are welcome!

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Treading on shaky ground

2007-10-11T15:49:00.000+02:00

If I were Dumbledore, then I could put my thoughts, memories in my pensive to keep my mind clear and fresh. But I'm not him at all and my mind now feels overburdened with news that I can't keep in - so I let them out.

You know, it's a great thing to tag blog articles. It keeps them categorized, easy to look for, easy to oversee, etc. What I'm now about to write, though, fits in a new category (well, at least to me): treading on shaky ground. What is it? You'll see, just read on!

Everybody paid immediate attention to one of Nokia's recent acquisitions, the agreement for Nokia to acquire NAVTEQ. You know, two things couldn't escape most people's attention: first, the huge amount of money Nokia is willing to pay ($8.1 billion!), second, that it is such an area (GPS and location-based services) that hasn't been fully explored yet. They must foresee something (and of course play an active role in it) that others haven't been thinking of yet!

And it's not the only acquisition Nokia was recently involved in: for example, they also merged with Enpocket. This deal is to give a boost to advertisement after the public announcement that Nokia is opening to the Internet. Not as if we didn't know that NSeries is open to anything, we now know that to the Internet, too. In addition, and I'm sure most of you already know, Nokia has launched new services for content download & consumption lately, check out Ovi and MOSH to see what I mean.

So good, so nice. But you know what? There are some parties who are not happy with Nokia opening to Internet and offering content online. It's said to be the operators (carriers in US) who will lose the most money if Nokia happens to be successful in this area. Although their online offering (mostly ringtones and themes) can usually be described with one word, pathetic, they're still the biggest revenue generator for Nokia. What happens, for example, if some UK operators refuse to sell new Nokia models? What happens if others follow them? Although, as I've already pointed out, Nokia might not be really affected by such a sudden(?) move in the US, it'd still be an unpleasant thing to happen to Nokia. I sort of have a feeling that what we see happening around is a total war between Nokia and others (operators, mobile manufacturers, OS vendors, etc.). That's the way how it goes.

As to mobile operating systems, the competition is also getting more and more tough. Although it's nicely put by Atmasphere that iPhone is a feature phone, in contrast with N95, the über-smartphone, Apple definitely has influence on newer phones not only from Nokia, but other handset makers, too. It's also worth noting what he found about the afore-mentioned two phones:

The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.

So from that point of view, Apple might not pose a considerable risk to Nokia's position yet. But how about Google? Even though it's a bit of an old news that Google is working on a mobile OS, I'm wondering how it will threaten Symbian's future. It's said to be a Linux variant (a new distribution to make the market even more fragmented?) and of course will be ad-supported (== cheap). Looking forward to it!

Thanks for being my pensive so far, I feel really relaxed now. And also eager to know what you think about all these things I've mentioned!

Cheers,

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Being featured by Nokia

2007-09-11T22:01:00.000+02:00

I am honoured to be the featured Forum Nokia Champion this month. However, to be honest I was not prepared for the increased interest about me and my work and surprised to see the flood of e-mails day by day asking me for help regarding this and that problem. I try to answer these e-mails as thoroughly as I can, however, I'm afraid I can't give perfect answers to all of them.

Nevertheless, e-mails are only one thing. People are asking me to let them join my LinkedIn network, too. Although the way they're asking it varies case by case, I'm afraid I have to refuse these requests all. You know, my biggest concern is that I wouldn't like to acknowledge that I know someone with whom I've never met. And since giving referral of someone is one of the core features of this networking site, it simply doesn't make any sense for me to do so.

But the last thing that happened to me just the other day is that I got an e-mail from Sargam Bansal. Yes, right from him (her?). I don't know where he took my e-mail address from or if it has anything to do with me being featured by Nokia, but it doesn't matter at all: he found me. Let me cite his e-mail in its entirety:

to: my e-mail address
cc: Olli-Pekka.Kallasvuo@nokia.com

Dear Sir,

I ve been using Nokia for past 5-6 years.
I had submitted my Phone NOKIA 3250 at Nokia Care Centre Sector 3 Noida(JOB SHEET NO:-1200196776 ; Serial No :- 357933005291399) for the problem it used to hang when music was on & some call used to come.

I got my cell after 15 days & after that the phone's condition was horrible. Itwas completely damaged , not even it was able to switch on. The Phone was submitted again. It been over one month & on each visit they are delaying the date.Not only me many people coming there are totally frustrated for the service being provided by Nokia care centres .

I emailed over a week ago and I have not received any reply. Similarly, when people email Nokia's Customer Support they are getting no response, which is surely unacceptable.
Due to such irresponsible behaviour, there has grown immense dissatisfaction among us, the users of NOKIA & also it makes me doubted about the name NOKIA have had in the past years. Now it has became a difficult question to answer.. Can we really trust NOKIA now???

I am sure you will be concerned about this matter and I would respectfully ask for your assistance in arranging for Customers to better informed and to receive prompt responses to complaints and enquiries.I hope you can agree that this should not be too much to ask nor beyond the capability of Nokia.
Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks & regards,

Sargam Bansal

Regardless of the seriousness of this e-mail, it's quite obvious that I can't help. Other than publishing this e-mail so that other (more competent) people can also read it and possibly react on it. However, there is one thing that I hope you have also noticed: who was cc:-d in this e-mail? Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's CEO and not other. You know, I've never dreamt of being in the same e-mail group than him, but now that I have achieved it, I think I'll make an exception with Olli-Pekka: I'm ready to accept his invitation on LinkedIn. :-)

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Time of competition - a peaceful summer?

2007-07-26T15:20:00.000+02:00

Summer is hot, silent and peaceful in Hungary. I can just sit back and watch/read what's happening around the world. And in mobile space, of course.

Well, it's not that silent as I expected. In the past few days I have noticed new signs of a tough competition between mobile- and consumer electronics device manufacturers, internet service providers, mobile operating systems. Let me go into the details!

Although Nokia is clearly a market leader, they have to listen carefully to users' demand. On smartphone market, for example, there's a new challenger who demands everyone's attention. There's been a lot of discussion over whether iPhone is a smartphone or not, but that's not my point now. They clearly showed people how easy to use a user interface (UI) can be (I also happen to know how an iPhone blends, but that's a different topic:). However, the UI is not everything: there must be great (and well-implemented) features in the phone, too. You know, just in order to make a phone smart - if that's Apple's intention at all. It's not obvious as the mass market (=biggest revenue) of mobile phones is NOT smartphones.

These times everyone is trying to imitate iPhone's behavior on their phone; even one of my friends has put a new "iPhone shell" on his Windows CE phone - just for the feeling's sake. :)
Other people, on the other hand, wonder if iPhone is really selling at the same pace how Apple claims to be. You know, it's just one thing, they say, how many phones Apple and AT&T could sell so far (not to mention how many have actually been activated), it's just the hype that keeps selling at this level. Sooner or later, however, everything (and everybody) will calm down and we'll see how successful Apple is. Let's see!

Another company is also trying to expand into this new area - at least new to them. It's been announced several days ago that Google invested in cellular technology. No surprise, we already knew they're interested in this technology area (i.e. mobile), too. What might be a sign of a new aggressive campaign is that Google makes the conditions to FCC for a wireless spectrum auction. You know, I pretty much sympathize with Google in this case and hope that not only will the rules change (free download of any applications, services or content), but the list of operators will be refreshed, too.

By the way, Russell Beattie is back. In case his name doesn't sound familiar to you, he's an American blogger (one of my favorites) from the Silicon Valley full of great ideas. This time he shared his opinion with us how he sees the future of Nokia S60 UI. He's not alone with the vision that Nokia will change to Linux from Symbian, what he adds, though, is that he expects (or rather suggests) Nokia to revolutionize their UI, too. Neither would be an easy change just a side-note.
On the Linux issue, it's been already told that royalty-free doesn't mean entirely free at all. There must be (lots of) people who customize Linux to the needs of manufacturers, operators, follow market demands, adds features to Linux that have never been implemented since Linux originally has not been a mobile OS. The interest of all the possible players is very fractioned, there're already several interest groups who are doing their own design, following their own desires, etc.
On the other hand, there're lots of things Symbian (Nokia, UIQ, etc.) could learn from Linux, especially from their developer community. For example, I'm not sure if you've heard about the service outage of Symbian Signed that happened recently. For example, one of my fellow Forum Nokia Champions, Antony Pranata, was in trouble due to this. There are other people, too, who are not too happy with the current situation and think Nokia and Symbian could make it better.
Finally, as to the UI revolution: I'm pretty sure that everybody at Nokia has already drawn the conclusion from iPhone's success. I bet they've even already started to design the new approach of a touch-based model from Nokia. I'm really looking forward to it. And finally, a side-note to Russell: not as if it was a trivial step for Nokia to get rid of their "old" UI design in a jiffy. The UI (believe it or not:) is one of the core features people love the most in their Nokia phone. They might interpret a radical change in the user interface in a way that would make Nokia, khmm, unhappy.

That's it for now, I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts!

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Nokia's new strategy in US market

2007-06-25T23:48:00.000+02:00

I, and other much wiser bloggers, have already written about how unsuccessful Nokia had been in selling phones on the US market. It seems that American people are resistant to smart phones, they're simply satisfied with text messaging and using their phones mainly for voice calls. Unfortunately, the carriers didn't make it easy for Nokia to be the #1 in North-America, either.

But that might change over time. As Nokia reported in their press release, they are trying to find new ways to sell their phones, but this time without involving the carriers. I hope that Ewan's prediction will come true and users are now ready to buy and use such advanced mobile gadgets. Especially if they are from the business segment: first, it's more likely that those users can afford cell phones for hundreds of $s, second, they might even use more than 10% of the provided functionality. :-\

Let's see, I really wish all the best to Nokia! You know, my future might depend on it. :)

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Forum Nokia Champion Day in Singapore

2007-06-23T13:38:00.000+02:00

Hmm, I've already wanted to write a blog about this event, but it seems Naresh was faster. :) Anyway, I can add my thoughts, too.

So, one of the great benefits of being a Forum Nokia Champion (or FNC) is that we can attend the FNC Day held twice a year at various locations. The first was in San Francisco, which I unfortunately couldn't attend. The second was held in London just one day before Smartphone Show, 2006. That was great! First, I always like kind of networking with other people who are interested in the same area (i.e. mobility). Second, Nokia is a gallant company meaning that we couldn't have any complaints as to how we were treated during these events.

For example, let's take this event that took place in Singapore. Not only did Nokia pay for the accommodation in a 4-star hotel, but - for some of us - they also paid the airfare. Okay, we've got it as a reward for contributing to the successful launch of Forum Nokia Wiki, but still: let's say it was a fair deal. :)

By the way, I thought in the beginning that Singapore was not the best selection for the FNC Day. Not as if it wasn't a nice location, but it's too far away from most of us. But still, about 20 of us could make it and were there and it was fun to be there. I liked all the Indian guys (they were the nicest, the funniest:) and it was a pleasure for me to meet "TCB" Paul (I could never imagine that a 3rd-party software could get TCB capability), "FlashLite Master" Alessandro, "Medical Man" Arto, "Y-Browser" Jukka, Paul "My students can do everything" Coulton and "I evangelize Python for S60" Jurgen. It's by far not an exhaustive list of people who were there and I enjoyed staying with - I've just picked up some from my memories.

So, I'm pretty much satisfied and happy that I could be there, now I just need a few days (weeks?:) to relax and recover from the long flight. :) Thanks Anina, Hung and the whole FN Champion team to make it happen! I'm wondering, however, where the next event will be held. London, New York, Brazil? Why not?

Cheers,

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Symbian Signed is not an anti-virus software

2007-05-23T15:33:00.000+02:00

The Register reported today that a new spyware for mobile phones had appeared on the horizon. It's harmful for S60 phones, too, 3^rd Edition devices included. And what causes the stir in the water is that it's a Symbian Signed application.

There's a general misconception here, I'm afraid. I think the biggest problem most people don't understand that signing has not much to do with protection against malicious programs. These people don't understand that the process is about signing (surprisingly), i.e. certifying that the application comes from a well-known source. Additionally, in order for an application to be Symbian Signed it must undergo thorough testing being done by independent test houses. Since this application is Symbian Signed, it must have passed those tests.

The problem is that it's impossible to test everything an application can do. It's even possible to acquire for a capability (and get it!) just by saying that the application needs it for a different purpose. As this example shows: I can ask for e.g. NetworkServices capability and say that I need it for remote backup. And then make no mention on the fact that I will use it for other reasons, too. You know, it can be done since no-one checks the source code, it's not part of the approval process for Symbian Signed certification. And it will never be, I suppose, as no-one will ever share their best kept secret (i.e. the source code) with outsiders.

What Symbian (Signed) could do better, though, is that they shouldn't advertise these signed applications as "trusted". Because they aren't. What you can trust, though, is that the author of a Symbian Signed application is accountable. If he/she/they produce a software that proves to contain some malicious code, then they can be "caught" and counter-measures can be taken. What counter-measures? For example, the author's certificate can be revoked and added to a list, called Certificate Revocation List or CRL for short. This list can be always checked upon on-line. For example, when a user is just about to install a 3^rd party software whose author is not known (or at least not trusted), the Application Installer can do this cross-verification as part of the installation process. Pretty useful info, isn't it? Worth noting that most users are not aware of this and they have this feature disabled on their phones. Including me, but that's on purpose. :-\

Just my two cents,

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My new N95 - comments

2007-05-18T22:40:00.000+02:00

I have received my new Nokia N95 device as a reward from Nokia for contributing to the launch of their new service, Forum Nokia Wiki. I was among the top 10 Forum Nokia Champion contributors, you know. We have received something else, too, but it's still too early to talk about it. I'm planning to get back about it in a month or so.

Well, I was very excited about this device, because I must admit it was my dream device. THE smartphone that I've always dreamed of. I have read couple of reviews on it by now (e.g. on AllAboutSymbian or Symbian Freak) and I was very convinced that the only issue that these reviews had found in common was the battery. The fact that it gets exhausted very easily, very fast. That's okay, I thought, I believe that's an issue that I can easily handle. I'm sure that Nokia is aware of this problem, too, and they're on it to fix it. Not necessarily with this phone, but with future phones.

However, I think I can tell you/them a few other hints they might want to pay attention to. Or maybe not, but at least I did not keep my comments secret on this great device. :-)

Lack of memory card in the package. This is the third device from the N-series that I have got without any multimedia cards. First, an N90, second an N73, now it's an N95. Hey, it's a multimedia phone and I can hardly believe that the built-in storage is sufficient for multimedia purposes. And I can't believe it, either, that Nokia is to save some money on NOT including a memory card in their sales package, because the price of such a piece of hardware is so low. Then why is it not included?
Battery. The topic that I have already mentioned. It's just right my second day, but it has already proved to be true that I need to charge the battery once a day. I was already recommended to get used to it, now I'm on that path. :-|
GPS. This is the first GPS device of mine, so I don't know too much what to expect from it. I can see, though, that the built-in program is data-hungry and tries to get that data from the internet (without a network connection it doesn't really work, i.e. is not really useful). It's not a good sign for me, because I have decided not to spend too much money on using GPS, but try to keep my spending as low as possible. Perhaps the installation of additional maps will solve the problem, I don't know, I'm just hoping that.
Connected to TV. There is an RCA jack included in the package with which we can attach the phone to the television so that you can see it real-time on your telly what you're doing on your phone. It's a pretty nice feature that can be used, among others, for demoing, showing your pictures/video/etc. to your family, browse the web in full screen on your tv, etc. However, for some reason, voice was not audible when I was e.g. playing a game. I'm unsure as to where the problem is - on my phone or with my TV, in any case, it's waiting to be fixed. Just tell me if you have experienced this and managed to get over with it.
Localisation. You know, I'm from Hungary, Europe and although I'm pretty much happy with using English I've already got used to using T9 on my phone. It's such a brilliant feature that now I can hardly live without (at least in terms of short messaging:). The problem is that as I have forgotten to indicate my wish to have Hungarian language included on my phone I can't make use of (Hungarian) T9, either. Unless somebody smarter than me enlightens me how to fix this problem with the least pain.

That's it for now! By the way, before I forget: thanks, Ron and Forum Nokia, for this great device. It was really worth the effort of contributing to the Wiki. I wonder if others know that they can win an N95, too. :)

Cheers,

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Design patterns in Symbian

2007-04-25T12:11:00.000+02:00

This time my post will be a short one. :)

You know, I've been thinking about writing some posts on various design patterns applied in Symbian OS core components. My motivation is first that I enjoy reading/using code that has been carefully and nicely designed. Second, I wanted (and I still do) to encourage each developer to always think before starting to implement any solution for a given task/problem. It may sound as a cliche, but I found it a very common pattern that people (i.e. developers) had not considered how others will use their module (niceness of interface, readability of source code, etc.), how it fits into the big picture, how future-proof it is, etc. You know, ideally you shouldn't just code something, but rather do it nicely. That's the difficult part.

Even though I found this idea pretty challenging I've kept postponing my first article on this topic for various reasons. Now I'm late - at least with the first article. :) I've just noticed that rensijie from NewLC.com had posted two article about design patterns:

Good posts, Rensijie! I'm really looking forward to the next article on the topic. Or even I might add some. :)

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Forum Nokia Wiki - the responsibility of contributors

2007-04-09T15:32:00.000+02:00

As Ron from Forum Nokia announced, Forum Nokia Wiki has been launched just a week ago. We, Forum Nokia Champions, were asked to fill the Wiki with contents a few weeks earlier so it wasn't news to us when it was launched. Nevertheless, I thought it was a good thing to have a centralized knowledge base online available to anyone wishing to find answers to their technical questions. Ideally it's going to be updated regularly with high- and low-level information alike (e.g. architectural vs API-level) sharing all the knowledge that lots of developers have gained on many areas that have anything to do with mobile development. I believe it was a good step waiting for being made by Nokia.

However, users of a wiki system must be aware of that there are some rules that every contributor should follow. Because one side of the coin says that a wiki can be edited by anyone, the other side, though, suggests that it ought to be done well. For example,

Most people know that copyrighted stuff shall not be added to the wiki, unless the author of the material in question has approved of doing so.
Then it also has to be considered if the article to be added is really useful or not. Typically, "how to"s greatly improve the usefulness of a wiki, because what they explain is usually not mentioned in any off-line documents. As opposed to detailed API-documentation that should rather not be added to wikis (imho), since most developers interested in APIs already have a comprehensive API reference off-line.
We have to be catious on adding new things so that they're in a readable format meaning that it can be digested easily. For example, I have seen articles that not only lacked formatting (I mean, at all), but they used internet-slang, like 'r u nuts?' (emphasis on one-letter words). I'm pretty sure that it's obvious to everyone why this style should be avioded in wikis.
Finally, a very-very important thing: since anyone can edit any other people's article in a wiki, special care must be taken to change other people's contribution elegantly. For example, my articles have already been:

Re-categorized - by removing a category which the article belonged to on purpose
Re-formatted - so that external references (i.e. links) have been removed
Truncated - some parts have been removed that should have stayed intact.

Unfortunately, all these changes happened so that no-one asked me what I thought about the changes and whether I approve them. Side-note: I would not have approved these changes, btw. Also note that above is not a comprehensive list of what people should keep in mind, I just picked up some topics.

You know, there're a lot of people who don't know that wikis provide means to ease what I call elegant contributions. For example, MediaWiki, a web based wiki software used by e.g. Forum Nokia Wiki or WikiPedia, provides watchlist, feeds, notification mechanism for regular contributors to make it easy for them to follow-up the changes they made. Each article can be watched so that any changes are visible when one is checking to see if an article has been further improved since the last check. Feeds enable you to check it out what the recent changes were, for example. Although automatically not enabled, but e-mail notifications can also be requested upon any changes to any articles.
MediaWiki also lets you initiate a discussion over a topic of an article so that people can come to a conclusion over a debated topic without changing the content of the article in question. This is the reason why there is a comment page attached to each article in MediaWiki. If those people who changed my articles had been aware of this feature (or if they'd cared), then their contributions wouldn't have left mixed feeling behind.

Of course, it's not only bad things that happened to the articles that I published on Forum Nokia Wiki, but the vast majority is useful additions and corrections. In addition, I'm so much amazed of the growth speed of the wiki and hope that it will be at least close to this in the future, too. But I also see that there're still lots of things to improve - Nokia Ron and his team and the future board of administrators will probably spend lots of hours with figuring out how FNWiki suits their users' needs in the most convenient way.

Keep up the good work, guys!

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Protecting APIs - a different approach

2007-03-18T20:59:00.000+01:00

I have been wondering lately if the current is the most optimal way of protecting APIs in the S60 (or Symbian in general) C++ SDKs. It must not come as a surprise to any programmers that there are far more features in these SDKs than what we can use with the publicly available functions. But they are usually hidden.

How? Before answering this question, some technical details. In order to use a certain feature in C++ the following two conditions must be met:

The header file including the function to be called must be publicly available in the SDK,
The component, typically a DLL and its associated LIB file, must be publicly available in the SDK.

The first condition ensures that the code compiles, the second that the link process will succeed. The most common practice that Nokia applies when they want to protect an API (i.e. not let 3rd party use it) is that they remove the header file in question. I would call it as a lazy protection as it does not protect against reverse engineering. For example, as soon as the API becomes publicly available there is nothing that can prevent a developer from making use of that functionality. Okay, Nokia clearly forbids reverse engineering in their license agreement, but there might be people who think it in a different way.

The second type of protection, let's call it hard protection, is to remove both the header and the LIB (that we import in our MMP) from the SDK so that neither compilation nor linking succeeds. Naturally, the DLL must remain in the SDK as usually it already has clients that use the provided functionality. This workaround is also applied by Nokia and Symbian alike. Sometimes they make it so that the LIB file is missing only under emulator platform (i.e. WINSCW), but not from the target platform (e.g. ARMv5). This makes it more difficult for developers to test their software - but not impossible. Since if you cannot link against a DLL statically, then you can still do it dynamically. You just need to use RLibrary class for that purpose and call the exported methods based on their ordinals. Okay, it's by far not trivial and now we're knee-deep in sensitive and confidential data, but it IS possible.

Let's just stop here for a minute to think about why Nokia (probably) follows the above-described practice! If I wanted to protect some data and not let others use it, then I would do everything in order to impede people to make use of it. Not just invent some hackish solutions that can be relatively easily bypassed, but make it really hard for others to hack. But it might not be in Nokia's interest to do so. You know, they have partners to whom they open up some - non-published, but available - APIs every now and then. And if they can choose from simply giving access to a header file OR sharing e.g. a LIB file, too, then they naturally vote for the first option. In my opinion it's much easier to do due to e.g. traceability reasons.

We have now finally reached the point where I can talk about my idea on a (probably) better way to protect APIs. You know, there's a rule of thumb in Symbian C++ programming as of the introduction of Platform Security: if you have sensitive information (I mean, data) to protect, then you're suggested to write a server and let it guard that data. This solution also enables you to smoothly control who and how can access the protected resource. I believe that Nokia has already re-factored their code according to this pattern so that all sensitive data is taken care of by various servers. These servers may then check against capabilities, secure and/or vendor IDs. Ideally, there is no sensitive data by now that is not protected by a server.

And this is the point where I ask: why not make every API public so that everyone can use it? Following from all above, security must not be a concern here, since access to sensitive data is already under control. On the other hand, developers could greatly benefit from having access to DLLs that have been hidden from them so far. You know, I'm talking about a big bunch of features that have been written by some talented developers at Nokia, Symbian, etc. and hidden unnecessarily. Why not let others make use of those features if it doesn't harm?

There's an exception, though. If the piece of information to be protected is not data, but an algorithm, for example. If it's not of big importance what data we work on, but how. Garnished possibly with some IPR issues. If this is an issue and the executing code is in a DLL (i.e. not behind a server), then we can't expect too much from Platform Security. We can assign some strong capability to the DLL so that using it would not be trivial for anyone, but we'd have no option for fine-tuned secure/vendor ID check, for example. Perhaps even capability constraints would not be sufficient, either. I think that we (err, I mean Nokia, Symbian and others) could re-use the existing approach in this case, that is, not publishing header and/or LIB files in the public SDKs. You know, I don't think we should fully get rid of the current solution, but at least suggest to use it moderately.

Wishing to read your comments!

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Here is my program, sign it yourself!

2007-03-12T15:20:00.000+01:00

I've bumped into the following blog today. This is exactly what I was thinking about a few weeks ago! I asked myself if developers could distribute their apps freely? Of course, the bottleneck is that they have to sign their apps properly, which is time-consuming and costly. But if one publishes his unsigned SIS file (it can be signed as well, since a file can be re-signed), then it can be freely signed by anybody else. So that the author can get rid of the burden of having to have his application SymbianSigned before distribution takes place.

One issue, though, that this workaround raises is trust. Why would I sign a SIS if it's from somebody whom I don't know? Why would I trust the program and presume that it will make no damage, generate extra cost, etc.? Of course, it's such an issue that must be carefully considered, case by case, program by program. But still there are programs whose authors are well-known and respected: they haven't all had time/money to bother with signing. Or let's take open source projects: unless they have good funding they will never spend money on content signing, which cost will never be returned. Not as if I was aware of such an open source project, but still. :)

So let's have a closer look at how it would work in practice! The classification of capabilities is as follows:
Group #1: User-grantable capabilities that can be granted by the user upon installation.
Capabilities: LocalServices, UserEnvironment, NetworkServices, Location, ReadUserData and WriteUserData.

Group #2: Powerful capabilities that cannot be granted by the user, but do not require any manufacturers' approval.
Capabilities: PowerMgmt, ReadDeviceData, WriteDeviceData, TrustedUI, ProtServ, SwEvent, SurroundingsDD.

Group #3: The most sensitive capabilities that only device manufacturers (i.e. not SymbianSigned or any other authority) can grant.
Capabilities: AllFiles, CommDD, DiskAdmin, MultimediaDD, NetworkControl, TCB, DRM.

If one writes a program that requires capabilities from groups #1-2 then it can be easily signed by anybody even if it demands some sort of technical mindedness. The steps for being able to install such a SIS file on our phone are as follows:

Registration on SymbianSigned.com.
Requesting a developer certificate for a given IMEI (i.e. the person's own mobile phone).
Once having the DevCert, sign the program with it.

Following these steps enables anyone to sign any (Symbian) programs that can eventually be installed on a (Symbian) smartphone. On any programs, I meant those that do not require capabilities from the third group. Another constraint of a single DevCert is the inability to sign a program for more than one phone. That requires an ACS Publisher ID from VeriSign - costs 350 bucks, btw.

And what about those programs that use APIs protected by capabilities from group #3? For them, one must have an ACS Publisher ID even for a single phone. And not only is it the cost that might prevent most people from requesting a publisher ID from VeriSign. If you'd like to be able to sign programs with the most sensitive capabilities, then getting a publisher ID is the easier task. The second step is to issue a request to the device manufacturer in which you detail which capability you need and why. On API level (e.g. I need RFormat::Open() to use and for that I have to have DiskAdmin capability) and for each capability one by one. And believe me it's tough! It's time and energy consuming and sometimes doesn't lack unnecessary conversation with the manufacturer ('we don't think you need that capability' ... arghh).

As a brief summary I still think that it's worth going on this path. For a well-isolated target group, namely mobile geeks, but for them it's really worth. Yes, it's you who reads this blog. :)

Migrated from Forum Nokia Blogs.

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Smartphone OS market share in 2006

2007-03-12T15:19:00.000+01:00

An article on smartphone OS market share by region (between 2004 and 2006) made me think. Since I'm an analytical mind and also interested in this topic I've automatically started to compare the two figures. And as the author of the aforementioned article has left the analysis part to us (or was he just too lazy?:), I've taken the effort to draw some conclusions from the figures.

So, let's take the regions one by one as shown on the figures!
- European, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA): Symbian still rules smartphone OS market here.
- In Japan almost the whole market was ruled by Symbian in 2004. This has significantly changed by 2006 since Linux has appeared on the horizon with its ~40%! I bet Symbian is not too happy about it, even if they have shipped lots of new phones in Japan recently.
- China: first, let's start with that Microsoft was present on the market in 2004. In contrast, their market share has dramatically shrunk almost to non-existent by 2006. Second, Linux is yet again an important factor that analysts and more importantly phone manufacturers must take into account in 2006. Its roughly 40% market share is very considerable. Third, the strange thing is that Symbian's market share has remained intact during these two years - it's still around 60%.
- North-America: one of the strangest markets - at least from our analysis' point of view! In 2004, Palm phones were dominating the smartphone market (~50%). Their market share, though, has dramatically shrunk to less than half of their previous share (now ~20%). The same pattern can be observed with regards to the popularity of Symbian OS - but with different numbers. In 2004, Symbian was the second smartphone OS vendor dominating 30% of the market - in contrast they're now the fourth with their ~10%! Who won then? Surprise-surprise: Microsoft! They were the third most popular OS vendor in 2004 (~10%) and now they're the #1 with ~30%! The last observation is that RIM has pretty much gained position - they're the second now.
- Finally, the rest of the world (ROW): well, similarly to EMEA market Symbian phones are in monopoly.

As a brief summary my findings are as follows. Symbian's hegemony is noticable all around the world. In most places more than half of the smartphone OS market is in their hand(held)s. :) With one exception, though: North-America. There are couple of interesting articles (on SymbianGuru, Darla Mack's and Tommi's blogs) as to why Symbian, most notably S60 phones are not present in North-America so it wasn't surprising for me to see the trend. It came as no surprise, either, that Microsoft is just there in North-America - what I found interesting, though, that basically this is the only market where they are taken into account at all. Finally, it's already a cliche that Linux phones are coming. LiMo, MontaVista's Mobilinux and TrollTech are just a few keywords everybody blessed with a little foresight might want to memorize. Japan and China are two countries where experiments are being made with mobile linux - and their success seems to be tangible. But let's not continue the debate on which mobile platform is the best and more importantly who will win in the long run. On the one hand, that's impossible to predict, on the other hand it's worth another article. :)

Anything to add?

Migrated from Forum Nokia Blogs.

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Symbian vs iPhone

2007-03-12T15:16:00.000+01:00

I've found a link (thanks, Peter, for sharing) to an interesting article that details why iPhone's (and Apple's) OSX is better than Symbian OS and how it's going to beat it. I have some thoughts about the author's arguments, let me share them.

In most regards, Symbian's reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it's probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it's mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.

I must disagree with this statement. You might argue that the OS is not modern as lots of "not-so-new" features, such as STL, is not included, but this does not necessarily mean that it's not modern at all. How can you claim that the system is not robust, stable or advanced? How do you measure it? I don't think Symbian OS is worse in general than its competitors. On the contrary, I believe it's very robust and stable. Just an evidence: it can run for days, weeks without having to reboot it. Just show me another (preferably open) mobile OS that can do the same. And you mentioned that it had a very long feature list and the OS was the best today. Based upon all of this why do you say that the OS has not deserved to be the #1 OS for mobile phones?

The Three Symbians
From one point of view, there are no ‘Symbian’ phones in the market, but rather three incompatible and diverging OSs: NTT DoCoMo's Symbian MOAP for Asia, Nokia’s Symbian S60, and Sony Ericsson’s Symbian UIQ.

You're right and wrong. You're right that there is a very thick layer (S60, UIQ and MOAP) on top of the core Symbian OS that makes the three platforms incompatible at some extent. But you're wrong, because you can minimize the difference between these variants with some clever effort. For example, most engine components can be written with a common codebase. Which is not true if you compare different OSes like Windows, Palm, etc.

On the other hand, there's no better solution, I'm afraid. Neither Java nor Linux brings us the *ultimate solution*. And I'm sure it's clear for everyone why I'm not talking about WinCE here. Unfortunately, mobile OS market seems to be heading to divergence rather than convergence.

Finally, variation for iPhone and OSX is not an issue here as there is nothing to variate yet.

To make it even worse from a third party developer's point of view, Nokia and Symbian made the new S60 version 3 binary incompatible to previous versions of S60. So none of your old Symbian apps will work on any new phones (i.e. if you actually bought any :-).

You shouldn't be so cynical. Actually lots of phones have already been sold that are based on S60 3rd Edition. It's just one thing that you do not know it.

Symbian Signed
So much for independently third-party software development on Symbian compared to the ‘closed’ model used on iPhone. In practice the difference is not that big. Apple will, of course, allow close partners to develop apps like they do with iPod Games today.

"In practice", the difference is HUGE imho. In case you have not noticed, Symbian phones are not closed as opposed to (the almost) closed iPhone. I presume that to be a close partner of Apple will be much more difficult than to have your application Symbian Signed. And in lots of cases your application doesn't even have to be Symbian Signed - it all depends on what you want to use on the phone. You know, most applications are able to run smoothly with the most basic capabilities (or even without them) that do not require your application to be signed. I suggest you to take some lessons on how Symbian Signed works before judging it.

And you know, this is the price phone manufacturers have to pay to operators in order for their device to be sold. I believe it's still better than not being chosen as a 'close partner'.

Symbian Design Issues
... entire section ...

While I agree with you with regards to most of the technical issues you listed, I have one question: what do you expect from Symbian to do? Do you expect them to withdraw all those design decisions that they've made during those days when it was reasonable to make those decisions? You know, it's easy to criticize, but very hard to offer alternatives ... Not to mention the fact that it would most probably introduce another bunch of source/binary breaks in most programs. Obiously, it would be especially painful these days since we have not yet recovered from the shock of Platform Security. Instead, Symbian should make a smooth transition from old design to new (if it's reasonable), which will naturally take some time.

Analysts Wrong on Symbian
Most media in Sweden (and elsewhere) have reported that the iPhone is nothing new at all. It's mainly a nice package with limited/bad hardware and nothing particularly new on the software side.

Isn't that true?

However, if you look at the speed and effort needed to make new applications on iPhone compared with other platforms it's two completely different worlds.

I'm a little bit confused: does it make sense to make new applications for iPhone? Most probably you won't be able to install them at all.

Existing Mobile Platforms vs OS X
With Symbian (as well as WinCE, Palm OS, and I suppose also the Linux phones because they probably have a very limited number of Linux frameworks installed because of memory restrictions etc) you have a big problem to deliver on the marketing hype and media expectations because of all limitations. This is one of the reasons all mobile services are failing to badly—it's simply to hard and complicated to deliver the market expectations with today's platforms.

At this point I must admit that I have never used OSX (consequently never programmed for it, either). But regardless of that still wondering how OSX and iPhone overrule the rest of the mobile platforms?

Five Years Ahead
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Well, here I again must admit that I have never used Objective-C in my life. Thus, I can't make my own decision about this issue based on my own experience. What I have heard, though, from people who had used it is that it was very uncomfortable for them to use that language. And they felt sort of a freedom when they had changed from ObjC to C++. There weas no-one who told me that ObjC was (a) better (experience) than C++. Knowing that, is it really the language, the foundation, based on which a new mobile OS will rise and overrule the others? I don't think so, but please disprove me.

Nevertheless, I can see that you're right at some point. There're lots of things to improve, only a few examples:
- Documentation ==> developers spend a lot of time with browsing technical documentation. And it's by far not perfece/complete. One of the main (true) complaints about learning Symbian is that it has a very long learning curve. Although I think we're heading to the right direction (good examples in the SDKs, good and thorough books, trainings, forums, etc.) it still takes too much time for a beginner to get used to Symbian. We definitely need more better tools, for example, Carbide.C++'s UI Designer is another good step to the right direction. And Symbian and its stakeholders must realize it and take actions against it (I mean, the long learning process) in order for developers still to be motivated to write programs for Symbian.

- Tools ==> it's a cliche that there's no ultimate tool for Symbian development. What is even more painful that there is no single *free* tool that anybody could use with great benefit. For example, when Nokia made a political decision about not to support MS Visual Studio in their SDKs they should have already come out with a better alternative instead of MS VS. Not with CodeWorrier, of course. I believe that instead of investing so much money and time in CW Nokia should have turned to open source community sooner and then we would have a better, more stable and useful tool (Carbide.C++) by now. In my opinion, if Symbian and "their companion" want to give a boost to Symbian development, then they should provide/use free tools that simply work. Okay, it's easy to say, but still...

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Do you think that PlatSec signing process is a nightmare?

2007-03-12T15:15:00.000+01:00

Well, then let me share the following article with you about midlet signing. It describes how painful a Java midlet signing process can be. In addition to that, it also contains some basic information about how signing works (e.g. chain of certificates) and what it costs. Shocking experience. :-\

From signing and capabilities/permissions point of view I would say they're the same. You know, it's one thing that you've got to be familiar with a security system that sometimes simply doesn't work (unless you invest much-much money in it), the bigger problem that most developers suffer from is that you even have to pay for it. As security is our common concern wouldn't it make sense to introduce such a system in which nobody pays to nobody? You know, not only is the concern common, but the benefit would also be mutual. I know I'm so naive. :-\

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Cost monitoring

2007-03-12T15:12:00.000+01:00

I've started wondering just recently why there is no support at all for cost monitoring on our phones? Okay, on S60 phones there are two applications where you can monitor
- how much time you've spent with speaking on the phone,
- how much data you've up/downloaded.

You've spotted that neither tells how much money you'll have to pay at the end of the month, right?

Obviously, one of the main reasons why there is no such an application on your phone is that there is no such application on the market. Neither built in your phone. Is it that simple, huh? Not really. Let's think about it how our application should work:
- it either keeps track of how much time you've spent with speaking (you called someone or someone called you while you're abroad) and also monitors how much data you've exchanged (up/download, SMS, MMS, etc.).
- or connects to your operator's site and download data from there.

Let's examine these two options in more depth:
- Keeping track of everything on client side: it makes sense to do it as most of the required features are already present. I guess, at least as I presume here that the APIs Logs and Connection Manager applications make use of are publicly available. What is missing, though, the information that could be used to figure out the actual costs. Okay, the tariff could be retrieved from various places and eventually could be typed in into our fictitious Cost Monitor application as well, but first users are usually pretty much lazy to do that, second it's not even trivial to find out which rate we should apply when. For example, how do you know what rate to apply when you're abroad? You can't expect that the user will do all these operations as it's pretty much laborious. Even I would not do that. :-\ Not to mention the fact that even though it's kept track of e.g. how much data you've downloaded, but I doubt that I could figure out which bearer (e.g. 3G, WLAN) I used each time. As usually we use public WLAN service free of charge or pay for it when we're there, I wouldn't like to see those figures in my calculations. And I'm sure that there are other issues as well that we would need to tackle to get a correct end result.

Briefly: it would be pretty much challenging, if not impossible, to write such an application and even if it was possible it would put a big burden on users' shoulders to manage the application.

- On the other hand, if Cost Monitor application was only a thin client that could connect to the operator's site, then we could put all the burden of implementing the calculation logic on operators' shoulders (can you imagine an operator with shoulders?:). Which, in fact, has already been implemented as operators always know it pretty well how much money they can pull out from your pocket. I guess, some of you have already found it out that there is a little problem with this approach. Not implementation-wise, but from strategic point of view. And well, the problem is not only little, but HUGE: operators will never make such a service (e.g. a Web Services API) available publicly. It's simply not in their interest as it might inspire their clients (i.e. us) to have better control over their costs.

Finally, I did not go into details as to the features of our Cost Monitor application. The obvious one would be to give visual representation of the user's costs. A non-obvious, but very useful, one would be to be notified upon reaching/approaching a pre-set limit. I'm sure that everyone can immediately see why this feature would be opposed by operators - whose help we would rely on, btw.

Looking forward to your comments!

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Carbide.C++ - How to purchase it?

2007-03-12T15:06:00.000+01:00

We had to purchase a few Carbide.C++ licenses for our company - the first ones, actually. Therefore, I visited Forum
Nokia/Tools/SDK section in order to find the right link that I can click on to purchase the licenses. The problem that there wasn't
any such link. :( I could have downloaded the IDE, but I had already done it by then. I've also opened up the IDE (with a temporary
license) to see if it contains any menu items that reveal anything with regards to ordering licenses. Even though there is a
submenu under Help/Carbide licenses, which contains some menu items for installing, viewing and even borrowing licenses, but
nothing mentioned about buying them. So, after failing to find out how to buy this software, I decided to search for it on the Web!

First, I searched for "order buy Carbide.C++", again, on Forum Nokia - without any success. Okay, there was a bunch of links that I
could have chosen from, but it was not intuitive to pick up the right one.

Then I decided to use the ultimate tool with the same seach query: Google. It was the second link that worked (the first was NewLC - Hi, Eric, how are you doing?:). Surprise, what kind of link was it? A link to a FN Discussion Board topic! Hey, isn't it in the
interest of Nokia to sell their product?! Then, imho, it shouldn't be a *discussion board topic* that advertises it the best (i.e.
being the most popular link) the way of purchasing Carbide.C++, no? Reaching the end of the discussion it finally turned out that
there was a link that anybody can use. Btw, the links mentioned above are as follows:
- Buying Carbide Dev
- Forum Nokia PRO - Company Registration

Another interesting thing is that you have to be a Forum Nokia PRO member for buying the product. That's good, but I was afraid of
the same thing than a few poster were, too: FN PRO registration costs thousands of euros. Per year. Well, I haven't yet completed
the process of purchasing our licenses, however, I'm just hoping that Mike Trujillo (from Forum Nokia) is right: "There is no charge for setting up the account".

Any comments?

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S60 E-phones = ugly phones?

2007-03-12T15:04:00.000+01:00

We had to purchase a couple of mobile phones recently. We want to use them for business purposes. For that reason, I had checked out what our Hungarian mobile operators offered and what's available in Nokia stores nearby. First, we specified the criterion that an ideal business phone must fulfill (not in order):
- WLAN,
- VPN,
- Easy to handle (keys, menus, etc.),
- Good battery life,
- Has memory card,
- Pre-installed apps.

As a mobile geek and big fan of S60 phones, I have made the drastical step of excluding non-S60 phones. Even more, I wanted to deal only with S60 3rd Edition phones. And that limited the list to E- and N-series phones.

As I wrote, we were originally thinking of business phones, that is, devices from the E-series. Well, I checked them out and found that although each supports most of the features we were looking for, there were NONE that fulfilled each criteria. Okay, that's a natural thing, but what was even more interesting (and sad, indeed) that we found basically ALL of them bad-looking, ugly. Which phones am I talking about? Let me list them along with our arguments:
- E50: conservative shape, relatively big display (at least compared to the keyboard size), but small keys and more importantly small fonts on the display. It was very difficult to find out what is on the display.
- E60: this phone has an even more conservative shape. A bit bigger than E50 and both the display and the size of the keys were okay. However, it was not fancy _in any way_ and the keys were so close to each other that it would have been easy to press more than one button at a time. I did not like it at all, at least.
- E61: very big. It's said that the display and the qwerty-style keyboard is big enough and it's easy to use it. However, the size of this phone is so big (even though it's thin), that it wouldn't have fit into my pocket or belt-bag. And I don't want to talk to a phone of half a brick size.
- E70: fold form phone, which I do not really like even though I used it during development. Perhaps that's the reason why I don't like it? :) Also note that, for some reason, it's not available here in Hungary. I was told that there were issues with the software stability, which I couldn't verify. I don't believe rumours, but there must be some reason for not being available in the country.

So, there were 4 E-series phones, which I (and one of my colleagues) disliked. And it was not neccessarily due to the features they do/don't support (2 of 4 did not have camera, for example), but to their shape, form! You know, I wouldn't like to use a phone that I don't like to hold in my hands, even if it supports each and every feature on Earth.

Who told Nokia phone designers that business users don't prefer better looking phones? I think the shape and layout of these phones is overly simple, so simple that it scares some possible users from them. Like us, who finally decided to purchase a few N73. It also has most of the features we wanted to use and you know what? We've changed our mind and re-prioritized the features that we thought it was essential. Now we have a good phone, which we can use for almost everything. Business purposes included.

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Sony Ericsson to acquire UIQ Technology

2007-03-12T15:02:00.000+01:00

Interestingly enough, this post is neither about Nokia nor any of their products as you would expect from a Forum Nokia blog post. It's about Sony Ericsson and their press release regarding acquiring UIQ Technology. Many popular mobile blogs (e.g. here, here and here) have already drawn our attention to this piece of great news, but it seems they have all missed to point out a very important consequence of this step.

Or it might be only me who's a little bit worried about Symbian's future? Not that much, but still. You know, I have read couple of articles about the future of mobile operating systems and was a bit worried about that lots of them predict the fall of Symbian in contrast with the rise of Linux. For example, the last report I've read on this topic was made by ARCchart and can be freely downloaded from here: http://www.arcchart.com/reports/mos.asp. They say that one of Symbian's biggest disadvantage is that Nokia owns too much shares in it, which might scare off other manufacturers, mobile companies from licensing it. In contrast with Linux (as they say), which is not suffering from a similar effect, thus might look more desirable for mobile companies. Oddly enough, even Nokia is making experiments in the area of producing mobile devices (Nokia 770, Nokia 330 - not confirmed that latter runs on Linux) with Linux operating system, which might be a base for rumours, too.

So the point in my opinion is that Sony Ericsson's commitment to UIQ might significantly strengthen the position of Symbian OS in the market of mobile operating systems. Not as if Symbian wasn't already in a strong position for the moment, but hopefully it will have positive effects in mid- and long-term plans, too.

Finally note that as I've already written I was in London on the Smartphone Show, where I picked up a booklet from Symbian's booth. The title of the booklet is "The Insight Series with David Wood" (check it out at http://www.symbian.com/symbianos/insight/index.html) and it's about the thoughts of Symbian's EVP for research about basically anything that has something to do with mobility and of course concerns Symbian. What has really captured my attention is a chapter about The hidden value of the mobile operating system. In this chapter, David Wood explains why he thinks that even though Linux is a real alternative on the market of mobile OSs, Symbian doesn't (yet) have to worry about it.

Comments are warmly welcome!

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Random thoughts on web browsing in S60

2007-03-12T14:59:00.000+01:00

As I was involved in the development of S60 browser for years, I think I have a good overview on how a mobile browser works. Therefore I'm particularly interested in the "mobile browser war" taking place in S60. First of all, I'm surprised that there's a _war_ at all.

Of course, I'm talking about Opera and the new S60 (or OSS) Browser. You know, I'm a big fan of the latter (for reasons, see above) and I think it's a fantastic piece of software. I see that there are lots of other people around the world who share my opinion. Nevertheless, I still don't decline using other similar software, like Opera, just because it's not my favourite. Even more, I don't understand why supporters of either browser hate the other software and argue endlessly protecting their favourite. Hey, it's a free world, anybody can like anything and no need/place for hate.

It's just because both browsers are good. Extremely good in a not-so-easy environment! Whilst OSS Browser (any official name of this software?) is strong in showing web pages in their original layout, it's often found as a weakness, too, when the user has to scroll sometimes a lot in order to navigate to the relevant part she's interested in. Opera solves this problem by rendering the web page smartly (I mean, knowing that it's going to be displayed on a smartphone) so that it always fits on to the screen horizontally and even if the user has to scroll she has to do it only vertically. However, small screen rendering ™ has a drawback: the layout of the web page is changed and it's sometimes not what the author of the page wants and/or the users like. I think this is the main difference between these two fantastic browsers and it's really up to the users which one they prefer knowing the pros and cons. I personally bow to scrolling a bit more, but expect to see the page in its original layout, thus vote for the OSS browser.

But as to Opera Mini, Opera Software's free browser: I bow before them! To those who still don't know, Opera Software has written two different browsers for mobile phones: Opera and Opera Mini. So far I've been talking about the first, but I must tell some words about the latter, too. You know, I have visited Opera's boot on Smartphone Show and had a short chat with one the guys there. Besides that they share my opinion on the opposition of these two browsers, I heard some technical details about Opera Mini from them. First, it's not written in Symbian C++, but Java programming language. I was surprised to hear that as browsing requires as much resources (memory, CPU, I/O, network) as possible and the Java run-time environment is not famous of providing this as it would be desirable. But to my biggest surprise, it turned out that Opera Mini turns to an Opera server first asking it for downloading and rendering the web page in question on behalf of the mobile phone. I guess, the second step for Opera Mini is to download and show the "pre-digested" page information (not confirmed, though). That's fantastic! I mean, I'm amazed of how they could come out with such a brilliant idea. They can even apply compression techniques on the pre-digested data so that they reduce the amount of data to be transmitted to the minimum. Very cool! It's unnecessary to tell you that I've already downloaded and taken Opera Mini into use on my Nokia 6630. To my biggest pleasure - also unnecessary to say. What? - I hear. Yes, I'm using Opera Mini on my Nokia phone as the built-in browser is not good enough to my needs (OSS Browser has not been backported to older S60 versions).

Finally, as I've already written, I have attended Google's Q&A session on Tuesday. I was not surprised when they applied the common formula and said that "we're going to port/write as much software for Symbian in as short period as possible". I mean that's natural, it's certainly in their interest, too. Nevertheless, I started to think whether it's really worth for them to write software for S60 at all. Provided that the built-in browser is already close to perfection (just close, though), users of advanced S60 phones can enjoy almost(*) desktop browsing experience. Thus, no need to write anything for this platform! However, in the (*) section I wrote "almost" and I did it on purpose. You know, a mobile phone with such a small screen, never-enough memory, slow(er) CPU will never be able to beat desktop browsers, in my opinion.
Side-note: interestingly enough, I was not there when Nokia had announced their vision on the Smartphone Show that new mobile phones would slowly replace even desktop computers in the not-too-far future. Having mobile phones used for almost a decade, I would never have predicted it to happen. Tell me, when will you want to stare at a small display 1/20 (or less) in size of a desktop display? Or type in long documents with an ITU-T keypad?
So, it's Google's interest to make their services available on Symbian, too. Fortunately (and due to the fact that they're smart enough), their APIs enable anybody, not only them, to make this happen in a relativel short period. I can hardly wait until they announce their LBS-supported Froogle! :)

Any comments?

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Update: I was wrong when I wrote that it had been Nokia announcing mobile phones replacing PC in the near future. Mentioned in Michael Mace's great article, it turns out that it was Symbian. And don't forget to read the comments, too: I also share Steve Litchfield's opinion that we don't have to over-react this announcement. :)

Smartphone Show, London, 2006

2007-03-12T14:58:00.000+01:00

The Smartphone Show in London. I have already heard lots of things about it, but never been there thus far, so I was glad to have the chance to visit it. I've decided to be there for both days (Tuesday and Wednesday) so that I would have enough time to talk to everybody, try out/listen to everything. I mean, everybody and everything I'm interested in.

My feelings? Mixed. The good thing is that everybody was there who really counts in the Symbian world. Okay, I mean those that I'm aware of. :) Symbian, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, SysOpen Digia, ARM, Wiley (Symbian Press), BlackBerry, etc. Hey first: sorry for not mentioning everybody, but it's most probably thanks to my limited memory. Second: I have not mentioned Google on purpose. They have not yet contributed to Symbian so significantly that I should mention them, imho. Nevertheless, their cookies (I mean, the real ones, not the digital) were good. :)

Why are my feelings mixed then? Well, even though I'm from Hungary, a small country, I've already seen a few big shows, let them be trade or technical ones. This one was not one of them, at least not in my opinion. To my disappointment, I could wander through the area of the show in the first half an hour and pick up those boots that I decided to pay my attention to. Then I spent the first day with visiting those boots, talking to people, listening to others talking, etc. I've even attended a few seminars on Tuesday. Briefly: it was smaller than I had originally expected.

Okay then, what made me stay there for Wednesday? Well, besides the fact that I could have cancelled my hotel reservation and changed my flight schedule only for a horribly high amount of money, it was definetely the party that followed the first "working day". I mean, that was GREAT! Very good music (does anyone know the name of the band?), drink, food. The place had been a secret until we got transported there: it was called "The Container City", not too far away from ExCel London, where the show took place. At the end of the party, we got even taken near to the city center so that didn't have to think too much of how to go and where.

To my biggest surprise, there were even more people visiting the show on Wednesday. At least it seemed to me so. As I had already seen what I wanted to by that time, I decided to listen to keynote presentations in the morning and attend some technical seminars in the early afternoon (my plane left in the evening, so I had to leave early). It turned out to be a good plan and I could do what I had originally scheduled. For example, I was wondering what the heck BlackBerry could be looking for on the show, but after listening to their keynote speech (the lady was _very_ convincing) I could hardly stand to go to their boot and ask for a quote for my company. I was also interested in David Wood's speech, his vision of the next few years in mobile space was very impressive.

All in all, I'm so glad that I have visited the Smartphone Show. I've enjoyed it very much and I think I've gained much experience of it, too. Nevertheless, I might opt for a one-day trip in the future - that will be enough. Including the party, of course. :)

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