As with all these extended links of interest, it starts with a story somewhere on the web... in this case Mobile Crunch letting us know that the upcoming Palm Pre has the ability to take screenshots built into the operating system. Hold down the “orange/symbol/p” combination of keys and you get an instant screenshot, saved to the device, read to be sent away, resampled, mangled, used in a blog post, used to illustrate a review, and so on. Ditto on the iPhone, with 'hold down Home and press the power button'.
It's a really handy function for anyone writing about a device – and by making it easier for everyone to talk about the device, there is more word of mouth online and less fiddling around. No need to hack the device, no need to wait for an author to put something together using the provided OS hook and then charging £150 for it (or whatever the market rate is). So where is this inside Symbian OS?
Err.... it's been removed.
Yes another feature that used to be in Symbian OS when it was part of Psion, but unlike last week's Agenda/Calendar discussion, the ctrl-shift-fn-s combination for a screenshot survived right up until the Nokia 9300 (Symbian OS 7/Series 80 v2) before being shuffled away off the firmware to the great big repository in the sky. Interestingly, the other oft-used keystroke of ctrl-shift-fn-k (to kill the foreground application stone dead) carried on in the Eseries firmware for a little while longer. I can remember handling an early E61 and testing out the kill function in the Nokia offices, to a strange cry of “what did you do there, what's that?” from the engineer demonstrating the qwerty device.
Alas the modern devices, such as the E75, have none of these handy hooks left in the operating system.
The point of this is that building in features like this may seem to be a rather trivial factor, but it also shows that the team behind the coding are thinking about their device is going to be used in the real world. One of the first questions I had to ask Steve and Rafe on receiving a 5800 was “how are we taking screenshots for the reviews.” Someone in Palm is thinking about making the devices easier to use and promote and is therefore bringing this functionality to the fore. I'm not buying the argument that a hook in the software for the developers to exploit puts Symbian on the same level.
The screenshot process may be one small illustration of the ethos at work at Palm. Can the same be said of Symbian? As the Symbian Foundation takes over the code for both the underlying OS and the UI, I hope that they spend some time ensuring that the entire software stack they supply not only works in the real world, but is moulded by the real world.
-- Ewan Spence, April 2009