I have a dream of a world where people help each other, a world where people create simply because they want to and not because it's a way of making money, a world where there's a common desire to see our daily experience grow to be more than just the sum of its parts.
In case you're wondering, I'm talking about smartphones and communicators here, but in order to explain more I'd better go back to the very beginning of time.
Well near enough. To 1991, with the creation of the Psion Series 3. This, more than any other device, enabled the likes of you and I to put a serious amount of computing power in our pocket without crippling battery power limitations. In addition to keeping your diary and address book, the Series 3 enabled the creation of games, calculators, journals, spreadsheets, and so on, all on the move and all within a keyboarded device no bigger than a spectacle case.
The upshot for Psion was a sales phenomenon, with 3a, 3c, 3mx and eventually Series 5 and Revo models following over the next eight years. Sure it sold a million units and made a decent profit, but back in 1991 (and indeed ever since its creation in the mid-Eighties) Psion wasn't simply trying to make money, under the guiding hand of David Potter it was implementing a vision of how mobile computing could be.
In parallel with the Psion phenomenon, a community grew up. Helped enormously by Psion's inclusion of their OPL programming language in the ROM of each unit, owners started to write programs and share them, first on bulletin boards (remember them?) and then on the emerging Internet. Again, the goal of each developer wasn't to make his fortune but to 'fill a gap' by creating something new and useful. The vast majority of Psion applications were released as freeware or shareware, the latter often with minimal restrictions when unregistered. The idea was that the applications would actually help improve somebody's life, make them more productive. And if a few registrations came in to help fund further development then great.
For the user's part, there was a delightful honesty. This was a time before 'warez' and 'cracks', a time before demo and trial versions, many applications only had a single nag screen when started up. And yet users registered applications in their thousands, simply because they wanted to. As part of the Psion community, they wanted to contribute in some way.
Fast forward today and my dream, largely fulfilled in the heady old days of Psion, is in dire need of renewing. Symbian (many of whose staff are the same Psion arhictects and visionaries - people like Richard Harrison and David Wood) are doing their part, on the whole, continuing to create a great operating system and environment. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and the like are doing fairly well, too, creating devices at reasonable cost that we can base our mobile environment on. Even the network operators aren't doing too badly, their prices kept down by mutual competition.
Some blame must lie with (some, but not all) third party software developers. Take a look around a big download site like Handango - you'll notice that many programs don't have trial versions, usually because they knew that if a user actually got to try the software then they wouldn't buy it. And then there are copy-cat and get-rich-quick applications, such as the recent craze for 'anti-virus' software. And there's surprisingly little freeware. Come on developers, you're not going to get rich on a dozen registrations a year of some little utility, so why not make it freeware, go for the glory and contribute to the Symbian OS community?
Most of all, though, the blame lies with you and I, the people who own Symbian smartphones and communicators. Well, perhaps not quite you and I - the average AllAboutSymbian user is probably as enthusiastic and honest as it's possible to be - but certainly the millions of owners across the world who have somehow acquired an attitude of 'I must be able to get everything for free, however illegally, if only I know where to look'. Started by the craze for swapping music illegally online, software was a natural follow-up. After all, which of us doesn't get a spam email every day from someone trying to sell us Microsoft Office for $50? And now the warez scene has become a real problem in the Symbian OS world. Every time someone downloads a cracked copy of a game or application from a warez site instead of buying it from the developer, they're depriving the latter of their livelihood.
This isn't just conjecture, either. I was talking to Makayama, a small developer (several staff, spread across Europe), last month and their 'DVD to Mobile' software was apparently so widely pirated that they very nearly didn't continue. A couple of years ago, SymbianWare released a shareware game for the Nokia 9210 and saw it pirated widely within a few weeks. Again, they very nearly stopped developing altogether. There are other developers who have simply stopped writing software altogether.
Yes, times have changed since Psion ruled the Earth. We live in more commoditised world and a buyer expects a smartphone to come with everything they need. Therefore they try and acquire anything else for free. But it's the 'anything else' bit that ultimately builds a community and improves the capability of the smartphone for all of us.
There's more to mobile computing than popping into Phones 'r' Us and making a purchase, and Symbian OS device owners need to play their part. Both by being honest in their downloads and purchases and by contributing applications (OPL really is easy) and help to others.