SEE 2010 - Amsterdam 9th-10th November

Published by Rafe Blandford at 15:45 UTC, May 30th 2010

The initial website for this years annual Symbian show recently went live. They reveal that SEE 2010 will take place in Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage on the 9th and 10th of November. On the site you can find the basic information about the event and register your interest in attending as well as find out more about sponsor and speaker opportunities. SEE 2010 could be the venue for the first substantive look at the new UI of Symbian^4 and will set the scene for the Symbian ecosystem as it moves towards what is likely to be very busy 2011.

The exact details for SEE 2010 have yet to be announced, but the show will no doubt include the usual mix of exhibition, keynotes, training sessions and networking opportunities. SEE 2010 currently has two sponsors - Accenture and ST Ericsson, but more are likely to be added before November. Here is our live picture gallery from SEE 2009, which gives a quick flavour of last year's event.

SEE 2010

By November a variety of Symbian^3 devices will have been announced and some of them, such as the Nokia N8, will be available in retail. The show will come ahead of the critical Symbian^4 release, which will see a full rework of the default Symbian UI and a move to Qt as the default application / software framework. The Symbian^4 and Symbian^5 releases are widely expected to widen and reinvigorate the Symbian ecosystem, building on the step-wise work of Symbian^3.

While Symbian^3 is the first full open source release of the platform much of the early work on it dates back to the time before the Symbian Foundation was formed. The Symbian Foundation is moving towards a faster release cadence - roughly two releases a year. However platform releases do take a significant time to move from the drawing board to a hardened release in the repositories. Indeed the current Symbian releases (Symbian^1, Symbian^2 and Symbian^3) are, to an extent, suffering from legacy architectural constraints and a period under-investment three to four years ago, most notable in the UI layers (what was S60). 

This is one of the key reasons Symbian is facing wide spread external criticism, most obviously around the UI, but also in its general attractiveness to manufacturers in the face of the rising tide of Android.

Symbian^4 will be the first release to attempt to fully address UX concerns, but it will be Symbian^5 that can most accurately be described as a product of the Symbian Foundation methodology (open source led by contributions) from beginning to end. Symbian^5 should also see some of the maturation of current technology programs such as SMP (symmetric multi processing) and SHAI (Symbian hardware abstraction interface), which could give the Symbian platform a significant technical edge over its competitors.

This situation is relatively poorly understood outside the inner core of the Symbian ecosystem. Thus SEE 2010 gives the Symbian Foundation the opportunity to lay out its future direction and plans, as well as its vision for the future of mobile.

 

 


 

Filed: Home > News > SEE 2010 - Amsterdam 9th-10th November

Platforms: General, S60 5th Edition, Symbian^3

Categories: Software, Links of Interest, Developer, Industry, Editorial Thoughts, Events

News Discussion

malerocks
I thought the transition was to be largely completed by Symbian^4. Now I guess one more step has been added and we will see a good UI by ^5 only. For Symbian's sake, I (as a lover of one) hope that the transition period to ^5 is not too long and the UI that is finally delivered as part of ^5 is not ancient as compared to the UI that will exist at that time.
svdwal
Excellent venue, 10 minutes walking distance of Amsterdam Central Station and within crawling distance of most of the tourist traps Amsterdam is famous/notorious for ;-)
just aking
I thought that the narrative until now was: s^3 is at transitional system, but the _real_ revolution is going to be S^4? Shouldn't this website be more critical about this apparent shift in narrative?
Rafe
just aking - Symbian^3 has always been intended to be transitional. However, at the same time, it should not be written off. It is very important for Nokia and the productised version will be a big change (from S60 5th Edition / Symbian^1 devices). We may well see Symbian^3 devices have a longer shelf life than the 6 month release gap might suggest. For example I would expect the majority of lower end devices released in 2011 to be Symbian^3. However I do not have any specific information on this. There was some confusion caused by OPK's statements about Symbian^3 in last quarters earnings call (where he talked up Symbian^3), but a lot of that was about the audience he was talking too (short term view). I think a lot of this is also about getting use to having this kind of information in the open - previously roadmaps etc were well kept secrets.

Put another way Symbian^3 is important for existing Symbian manufacturers - whereas Symbian^4 and 5 are probably going to be what attracts new manufacturers into Symbian. So yes Symbian^4 onwards is really important and if you're going to pick one as revolutionary that's it. However the platform will not stand still going forward... Talk of Symbian^5 is really premature at this stage, for the most part, I probably should have made that clearer.



malerocks - It depends which component you are looking at as to which Symbian version is important. The new UI will be done in Symbian^4 (the big change), but there will be other improvements to follow (maybe saying it will continue to evolve is a better description).

Symbian^5 will see maturation of other components (mainly lower down the software stack). A good example of this is SMP - some bits are going in Symbian^3, some in Symbian^4, the majority in Symbian^5 and (possibly) some final bits in Symbian^6. Obviously it is very hard to generalise like this and be specific about releases which haven't been planned yet or are in the very early stages.
malerocks
I understand what you are saying Rafe. My point is that we never heard of ^5 been part of the transition and suddenly here it is been announced as the final step. The concern is that the UI that is ultimately delivered at part of ^4 should not feel broken or incomplete as it has always been announced in the past that ^4 is the one to look out for. Agree on ^3 been the transition step.

I also understand that evolutions will continue (we have seen Symbian move from 6 to 7, 8, 8.1, 9.2, 9.3 & 9.4 over the last 5 years) and hence ^5 and ^6 will come, but if what was promised and expected in ^4 spills on to ^5 and onwards, people may just loose their patience for a OS that is anyways facing a lot of flack for the UI and other points.
Rafe
Yeah fair point. I think its fair to say all the UI will be done in 4. So yes what has been talked about as the big change in 4 will happen.

However we will see some updates, as we do in every other version. There may be things like extra resolutions support (though using Qt as a basis theoretically makes different resolutions easy to support).
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