Dev Week: New S60 SDK and future Symbian devices

Published by Richard Bloor at 8:24 UTC, April 20th 2009

It seems that Nokia will shortly be releasing the first device specific S60 SDK (focussed on the N97) and there has been a lot of talk about Symbian on MIDs, how will this affect developers? Read on for my analysis.

Nokia N97 SDK – indicating the future?

If you visited Forum Nokia this week – via the home page – you will have seen an item promoting Launchpad – Forum Nokia’s open value added program for developers. The promotion centres on the availability of a Nokia N97 specific SDK.

No additional details are provided about the content of the SDK, but we do know that the Nokia N97 incorporates a new home screen into which web developers can add read-only views of their WRT widgets. It seems reasonable to presume the SDK will include features to test such widgets. For those interested in what else the SDK might contain, if joining Launchpad is not within your budget, it may be worth keeping an eye on the Forum Nokia blogs, as Forum Nokia Champions or staff are sometimes able to offer a preview of new tools.

This may be an indication of how Forum Nokia will offer future SDKs, as we move towards the full operation of the Symbian Foundation. As more Symbian devices appear at the mid and low end, the majority of Symbian based devices are likely to offer a vanilla implementation of the platform and be well served by a standard SDK. However, Nokia (and the other Symbian licensees) will be looking to offer differentiating features to users and developers alike, at the higher end. If the N97 SDK is representative, we could see many more device or family specific SDKs becoming available. But let’s hope not, as having to install and maintain multiple SDKs from multiple vendors could become inconvenient to say the least. The plug-in approach, used quite effectively for the Eseries, would be vastly preferable. 

MID means more?

Possibly the most widely reported news about Symbian this week has been the porting of Symbian OS to the Atom CPU. This follows on from speculation about Nokia’s plans to introduce a range of mobile internet devices and whether any of these will be running Symbian OS.

For those of us who originally came into contact with Symbian through the Psion 5 series devices, or indeed have a Series 3 gathering dust somewhere, the possibility of Symbian devices in a larger form factor will tend to elicit a rash of ‘back to the future’ comments.

As Rafe pointed out, Symbian OS on more PC like devices would be key in meeting Symbian’s goal of becoming the 'most widely used software platform on the planet'. It also fits well with comments made by Lee William’s when I met him at MWC – comments suggesting significant interest in implementing Symbian OS on devices other than traditional smartphones.

For developers these devices should offer more screen real estate to play with and greater processor and memory capacity. This offers greater opportunities for applications that have been hard to implement on small devices, such as mind mapping or project management software.

The developer opportunity will also be defined by the market these devices are aimed at. Nokia’s range of maemo internet tablets have been primarily positioned as consumer devices, although there is no shortage of specialist applications being created for these devices, such as Nikos Tsourakis’ Mobile Medical Speech Translator previewed at the 2008 maemo summit. 

With Qt for S60 maturing, Symbian OS based MIDs will provide a more comfortable platform on which to run migrated PC application as well as more traditional mobile applications. This has the potential to offer an interesting challenge to existing Symbian developers, who may see software from the PC and Linux world offering MID user more functionality.

One thing is certain, if Symbian is to maintain its momentum, implementations on devices other than smartphones will be essential.

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