Nice Seminars
Here’s part three of the trip to Nice. It’s reprinted from Your Symbian, where I write a regular column and feature articles. Well worth a read to keep up to date with the Symbian World. Anyway, this part is the seminars about Series 60.
State Of The Community
Nokia have spent the last year giving Series 60 a good foundation. The first non Nokia Series 60 phones are due to launch before Christmas this year – that’s Siemens SX1 and the Sendo X, and no chance of confusion in the names – there are five manufacturers signed up. Consumers have a choice of nine different Series 60 powered phones, and (although it depends on what definition you take) the interface is powering 70% of the mobile smartphone market.
What’s happening this year? Nokia are focusing on gaining more Developers, helping the phones appear different (while still staying true to Series 60). The benefit of a standard platform over multiple devices is a bonus to every developer, although the current lengthy (and fragmented) approach to Java is something that is being taken seriously.
The biggest change? The Ringtone market is due to be overtaken by their “Desktop Themes and Funky Icons” market. I weep for the world sometimes…
Making Series 60 Different
“My God, it’s full of stars…”
The Sendo X marketing campaign is going to stick in my mind. Not because of the flashy images, or the innovative ways that say this is the Series 60 dream machine (32mb of Ram!!!). No it will stick in my mind because all the background images look just like Dave Bowman’s entrance into the Stargate from 2001.
Now that’s out the way, what did Sendo have to say about their replacement for the Z10 MS Smartphone 2003 Mobile Blue Screen of Telecoms device? Well they’ve pushed the specs out. It’s got a huge amount of Ram. The size is smaller than even the 6600, (it’s comparable to a 3310) but it doesn’t feel cramped. And the MMC/SD card slot at the bottom is hot-swappable. Which means you don’t have to take out the battery and restart the device (maybe they should sell that bit of code to the Ngage2 team)?
You have to wonder how Sendo (from a standing start last November) can get to market before the likes of Siemens and Panasonic – is the fact that they are involved in the highly visible spat with Microsoft that they’ve been seen as the ‘favourite’ child? Time will tell.
Not since Jumpy! was released on the Psion Series 3 machines has an application been shipped with the exclamation mark as part of the name. The Sendo X has the ‘innovative’ Now! Screen is the main difference (after wallpapers and themes) to any other Series 60 phone. It’s a redesign of the home screen that can take in modules to provide more info (e.g. a Stock market ticker, the number of levels completed in a game, unread SMS’s, etc). The Today screen on pocket PC’s is a similar concept, and plug-ins for that are legion. The Now! SDK is out next year, so be prepared for a number of these modules.
The only worrying thing for me is that the Now! screen is controlled (partly) by the network operator, who can update it over the air without needing my permission. Hmmm, not sure I like this.
Series 60 and the Network
Looking and sounding like an embarrassed Art School teacher, T-Mobile’s set out to explain why users of Series 60 phones create more revenue for T-Mobile than the users of normal phones.
The key is the user experience, and allowing them a quick and easy way to get access to applications, ringtones and themes (arghh, them again!) [keep calm Ewan – Rafe]. Their engine for this is “T-Zones” (but you have Vodafone Live and Orange’s recently launched portal as well). Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone it’s a WAP site, because WAP is dead and buried in the eyes of the user.
Of course, WAP is alive and well (except in Redmond), it’s just been repackaged. T- Zones was started as a download centre for Java midlets in late 2001 (going live in 2002). It now runs over all the T-Mobile regions, and can offer specific content per region.
One thing I loved was that items can be priced differently – so that £3 ringtone in the UK will only sell for around 60p in Finland. Given ringtones make up 40% of T-Zone sales (themes are 20% and java apps are 20% and the other 20% is video clips), then this is the way ARPU is going to be driven in the next few years.
And he promised us the video clips feature more than just porn.
Developing For Series 60
Last up was Nadav Gur of Mobimate (who have the excellent World Mate application available on pretty much every PDA platform under the sun).
Nadav was talking about Series 60 from a developer point of view, but what I liked about this was that while he started by talking about the benefits of Series 60 (consistent platform, no need to rewrite apps for different Series 60 phones, acceptance by operators, etc). The talk was geared heavily towards the software market as a whole, with little reference to specific platforms.
Every developer (and especially the new developers) should try to get to this seminar if it is ever repeated – it’s a goldmine of information from a really successful company.
The bottom line is make sure everything is easy for the end user, from browsing your website, to installing the app, and to after care services. And of course the application itself.
Most of the talk was geared to the business manager of the companies, and given the crowd here was already full of successful software companies, it was aimed at slightly the wrong group. But really entertaining nonetheless. And Nadav gets bonus points for coping marvellously when his laptop battery ran out!
