Published by Ewan Spence at 10:56 BST, July 13th 2006
Ewan mulls over the announcement of Symbian OS 9.3 and what it means for you.
Just as the first smartphones powered by Symbian OS 9.1 arrive in the shops (namely the Nokia N91 and N80, along with the ‘coming soon’ P990i and M600i devices from Sony Ericsson) Symbian go and announce v9.3 of their mobile operating system. Have we all been duped into buying yesterday’s jam when the manna was round the corner?
To put it simply, no.
On a practical point of view, you probably bought your phone because it does everything that you need it to. You can make calls, get your emails, access to the web and everything else you need it to do. And if there is extra functionality that you really need, then third party applications should be able to help you.
For the end user, an update to the operating system shouldn’t mean dropping your phone and getting the latest model. For a start, not one of the handset manufacturers has announced a handset that will be running 9.3 (and some manufacturers are only now getting 9.1-derived handsets out to the market). So in a sense this isn’t a news item.
But in a way it is. If you look at the number of releases and point releases that Symbian has made since the Nokia 9210 made its debut, you’ll see a company constantly updating their product, listening to the needs of their clients (the handset manufacturers, networks and, yes, even the end-users), and not sitting back on a successful piece of code.
The only real hiccup has been the loss of binary compatibility in the move to OS 9.1, where previously compiled programs would need to be recompiled (and in some cases recoded) so they would work on the new devices. This was always going to be tricky, but was necessary to add in new security models and programming principles.
Symbian knew there would be heartache, and all the mobile OS’s have suffered from this. Microsoft simply leaves behind old platform users as they move up the Windows Mobile ladder, while Palm are professing to moving to a pure ARM core for their version 6.0, then an emulation layer for existing apps, but then it was Linux, with an emulation layer for ARM and the older layer under that… Each company has dealt with the problem in a different way, and the success of each strategy is unfolding for all to see.
It’s nice to see though that this only happens once (touch wood) for Symbian, as the newly announced 9.3 is fully backward compatible with applications written for 9.1. The update to 9.3 adds in a number of features that will certainly be useful in next year’s phones, but we’re into incremental changes that help the back-end support of the phone.
The main point of interest is the ability to update the firmware over the air (FOTA). Now this is something that the networks are going to love. One of the biggest headaches when selling these phones is knowing that they each contain inevitable small bugs, and then somehow shipping fixes to the user. Previously, this was only possible when the phone was returned for repair – and a significant number of ‘broken handsets’ are simply people trying to get the latest firmware. Having the ability for users (and tech support) to do this without returning the handset is going to lead to a very nice cost and time saving for all parties.
Symbian have also added in features to make the phone more attractive in new areas of communication. While there are still people who can’t see the logic of putting VoIP into a mobile handset, the addition of secure layers to the VoIP standards will be welcome. As the networks move over to being data carriers as opposed to voice and data carriers, the more traffic they can get users to push through their phone and this will drive revenue – that’s taken care of as well with the addition of the “3.5G” protocols of HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and the native support of Wi-Fi.
Users aren’t left out of all this. Although the delights of improved memory management and faster application start-up times might not sell phones, they will make users more comfortable using the devices. It will be interesting to see how the inclusion of USB on the go helps PC Suite and any current perceived weaknesses in PC connectivity.
OS 9.3 isn’t magically adding any super new features that would be available tomorrow, but it’s unlikely Symbian would publicly announce this unless there were some well developed handsets that are ready to be announced. With the Symbian Smartphone Show, the Nokia Mobility Conference, and other high level events in the mobile world coming from September, expect to see a number of 9.3 devices announced, with availability promised in early 2007.
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Categories: Comment
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 3
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