Symbian: Windows Mobile, Linux combine myth and fantasy

If you own the platform, you control the message.
That’s not some esoteric, technological mumbo-jumbo-though you’ll hear plenty of that this week-but one take on Symbian Ltd.’s position as sponsor of the Smartphone Summit, which allows the company to spin the data on its fortunes.
While David Wood, executive vice president for research at Symbian, took the opportunity as keynote speaker to explicate six accelerators for smartphone sales and new services that drive growth in that sector, he’s also an acerbic street fighter.
That would explain his view that it’s “a bit of fantasy” that OS rival Linux will grow its market share. Wood called Linux’ prospects “the myth of open source.” (“It’s free and cuddly,” he said, to much laughter.) He took a less eloquent swipe at Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile. With no authoritative, tech-savvy rebuttals to slow Wood’s steamroller, the all-roads-lead-to-Symbian view may have carried the day for the uninitiated.
To be fair, Wood’s data on Symbian’s current market dominance may be irrefutable-even if his rhetoric would have you believe that market trends spell nothing but doom for competitors. Smartphone sales now outstrip laptops, seven of 10 smartphones run Symbian and the latter has successfully defended its market share against rivals for two years. One can understand how Symbian’s most fervid evangelist would declare: Game over!
Except that the market clearly demands diversity and the forces arrayed to compete with Symbian, particularly in the United States, are among the toughest competitors in the business. It might have been more
entertaining if representatives for those camps suddenly popped out on stage to rebut some of Wood’s rhetoric-a sort of OS cage match. But, of course, that goes with the territory here at CTIA I.T. & Entertainment 2007. (Re-read the lead sentence, above, and repeat as needed.)
With smartphone prices coming down, reliability going up, style and fashion figuring in the equation, expanded capabilities, more articulate presentations at retail and a richer ecosystem that drives application development, Wood waxed optimistic that the smartphone market would expand to include all phones sold. eventually. For now, he noted, sales volumes of about 145 million smartphone units this year should bear out predictions of the sales of 1 billion units per year by 2012, just five short years in the future.
And in that future, navigation, language- translation services and new search applications will drive further smartphone adoption. The smartphone, Wood predicted, will become life’s remote control, handling home functions and financial matters as well as stodgy old communications.
The upshot, according to Wood, is that smartphones are becoming a matter of lifestyle.
“You don’t have to be smart to use them and the device makes you smart,” Wood said.
And with 25% of all network operator revenue derived from smartphones that run Symbian-Wood’s figures, not ours-then Symbian is destined to rule!
“Linux will fragment faster than it will unify,” Wood declared and, this time, he wasn’t kidding.
The competitive elbowing made for good entertainment for anyone who has heard Wood slice-and-dice at other Smartphone Summits.
But the fierce rhetoric made the session following Wood’s presentation on the latest smartphones feel lackluster, with one exception.
John Wang, chief marketing officer and “chief innovation wizard” at HTC Corp., cut through the fog created by those who tout the gazillion features that run on their devices by offering thoughts that guided the development of HTC’s new Touch, offered by Sprint Nextel Corp.
(Hewlett-Packard, iMate, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Research In Motion Ltd. and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications also presented and it was clear that Wang chose the right approach-and, appropriately, the least number of words-to get across one simple point: simplicity.)
“Simplicity is easy to talk about, difficult to do,” Wang said.
Rearranging icons is not simplicity, nor is flattening menus. At HTC’s MAGIC Labs, which Wang runs, an epiphany finally arrived, he said: think like a baby, a creature without experience, behavioral guideposts or expectations.
“A baby hasn’t learned anything yet, so it represents our innate abilities,” Wang said. “We discovered that if we wanted to advance the industry, we had to address simplicity by creating a direct, intuitive user interface.”
The result was TouchFLO, a touchscreen interface that allows swiping or scrolling with a finger, use with a stylus and functionality with three buttons. The visual manifestation of menu choices is a cube that can be rolled over, spun ’round, reversed-you get the picture. Swiping with a finger moves the page up or down, similar movements with a stylus merely highlight the selected content.
Before you smirk about your visual’s relationship to the most-dissected phone of the year, HTC planted those seeds more than two years ago. Mention the hullabaloo over Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Wang smiles a patient smile. He acknowledged Apple’s phenomenal marketing power-and others’ touchscreen work-while retaining the dignity of a true pioneer. “It’s been a real journey,” Wang said after the session. “The mobile-phone industry couldn’t sustain its momentum simply by adding more features.”