Symbian Partner Event

I just got back from the Symbian Partner Event at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Some interesting talks to comment on.

My favorite was Oren Levine’s discussion of open platforms for mobility (no surprise I guess that I liked this one). Oren spent a lot of time discussing the Web Runtime. This technology allows developers to write applications for Series 60 devices using standard web technologies: HTML, CSS, and Javascript with their extensions for device capabilities. If this sounds like a validation of the Rhomobile approach of providing a very web-like framework for writing native mobile applications, I would agree. The key thing is that Rhomobile’s Rhodes framework lets you do this for all device operating systems.

I also watched a very interesting presentation on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) which Symbian is adding to the operating system. Very interesting from a computer science perspective. But is it really a great place to put their development resources. One attendee asked the question “what applications do you have in mind for this” (mind you this was to the product manager Jason Parker who this question should have been deadone for). There was a pause of about ten seconds until Jason said “well probably web browsing and face or speech recognition, but we really don’t know”. I get that the full applications of such a step forward may take a while to emerge. I do think they should have more concrete app ideas that are grounding the tradeoffs that they make here.

One of the more amusing sights of the conference was that, although plenty of people were carrying Nokia N95s (including myself), almost everyone had an iPhone as well.

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