The evolution of the Symbian initiative advanced last week as the company held its first developers conference in London, supporting the release of version 6.0 of its open software platform for next-generation wireless Internet-enabled devices, and made several other significant announcements.
In addition to making public the new software platform, Symbian created new executive positions for a chief financial officer and executive vice president of sales and marketing, hinting at its intent to go public soon.
But the majority of the talk last week concerned technology. Version 6.0 of the Symbian platform dictates the basic, generic technological foundation of the Symbian platform, as well as the particular reference designs for the Quartz and Crystal class devices.
There are three types of Symbian device classes-Quartz, Pearl and Crystal. Quartz is the browser-centric personal digital assistant device featuring a pen-based interface introduced earlier this year. Crystal is more information-centric with a keyboard user interface, the reference design for which debuts along with version 6.0 of the platform. Pearl is the smart phone reference design and is not expected to be released until later this year.
The different reference designs necessitate different versions of the Symbian platform due to the different user interfaces.
Version 6.0 has been available to Symbian licensees since this spring as a beta version of sorts for testing and feedback. With the public release and shipment of the platform, version 6.0 is now open to non-licensees such as third-party application developers.
“Third-party developers have the software development kit and can start writing applications for the devices,” said Paul Cockerton, director of marketing communications for Symbian, which said about 1,200 developers attended the conference. Symbian claims 35,000 registered developers today.
Cockerton said he expects to see commercially available devices running the platform by the first quarter of next year. “Symbian is all about standards and everything, but this is really about handsets,” he said.
Currently, L.M. Ericsson’s 380 is the first Symbian phone on the market. But other Symbian members like Psion plc and Motorola Inc., as well as Sanyo, all were displaying Quartz class devices at the show. Matsushita Electric Corp. is the final member of the Symbian initiative.
“The 6.0 platform is the one on which Nokia will be building its first Symbian-based products,” said Jouko Hayrynen, vice president of markets and business development at Nokia Mobile Phones. “We also warmly welcome the introduction of the Crystal reference design, which is naturally Nokia’s choice for its future communicator category products.”
The platform also supports the SD Memory Card standard and comes pre-integrated with Nokia’s new WAP microbrowser.
The SD Memory card is like a disk drive for consumer electronic devices used to share data between them, created by Matsushita’s Panasonic division. The SD Memory Card association consists of several consumer electronic manufacturers dedicated to supporting the standard so their products can transfer files between them, similar to the Bluetooth initiative.
Wireless devices with SD Memory Card slots could download music or other files, for instance, and transfer those files to a better viewer or player for actual use. While Symbian is supporting the standard with the platform, device manufacturers must add the physical capability to take advantage of this internetworking opportunity.
“We support the SD Memory Card as a key standard,” Cockerton said. “It’s up to the hardware manufacturer as to whether they put in the hardware, but we will support the standard if they choose to do so.”
The same goes for the WAP software. While Symbian’s technology committee chose Nokia’s WAP browser technology as the pre-integrated solution, manufacturers are free to integrate other browser software but will have to undergo that process themselves.
“We’re promoting Nokia as the standard browser in the Symbian platform,” Cockerton said. “If they want to use another, that’s fine.”
The browser in question is the Nokia WAP Browser 2.0 which supports version 1.2 of the WAP specification. It is the first OEM product Nokia has made available for outside licensing, as well as the only WAP browser that is licensed with access to its source code. With the source code, licensees such as Symbian are free to make various changes to the browser functionality depending on device type, user interface and market needs.
Many third-party firms announced various degrees of support for the Symbian platform as well. ARM, a provider of 16/32 bit embedded RISC processor solutions, announced its digital audio and video software now supports the Symbian platform. The company ported four existing digital audio and video CODEC solutions, including an MP3 audio decoder, MPEG-AAC, audio decoder and two MPEG-4 video decoder and encoder software solutions. This is the first phone operating system the company has supported.
Other firms include IntraNet Solutions, with supported viewing technology, Braindock and TomTom for location information management and McAfee for its VirusScan security product.
Symbian itself took steps to further support its platform with the executive appointments of Thomas Chambers as chief financial officer and Mark Edwards as executive vice president of sales and marketing. Cockerton said the new positions allow Symbian to emerge from its recent technological incubation period into a role as a market driver.
“It indicates we are becoming more market focused,” he said. “We’re getting Symbian in the right frame of mind and making sure we’re talking to the right companies.”
As Symbian’s technology preparations move toward actual devices and sales, the company is expected to go public soon. Cockerton said an initial public offering depends on the number of products available in the market in the coming months.
