With 40 plus phones already available, and another 40 odd due out through 2005, Ewan's a bit worried that Symbian's number of handsets is leaving open an area that might cause problems. Fragmentation of the OS and UI, and confusion in the end- user. Read the rest of the news to find out why...

“Oh no, that application won’t work on that Symbian phone.”
“But it works on the one I have now!”
“Yes I know, but they’re just not compatible.”

If you’ve ever wondered just what might cause Symbian OS (and the various flavours) to not gain market acceptance, it’s the area of inter-operability. Putting aside the top 2% of people with phones (that’ll be people like us then – Rafe), you’re talking to people who’ve grown up in a world of inter-operability, where a program that ran on one Windows (or Mac) machine, runs on any other. Only now are we starting to see applications that are XP/2000 only in the Windows world, and OSX only in the Mac world.

Compare this to the already too-visible problems in the Symbian world and you’ll see that it’s just too complicated. It’s no wonder that “Powered by Symbian OS” isn’t a program that Symbian try to promote, because the four main flavours of Symbian OS (UIQ, Series 60, Series 80 and the FOMA user interfaces) have no way of running programs compiled for devices other than themselves.

Sure, there’s a huge amount of source code inter-operability for the programmer to deal with, but compared to the 25 million plus Symbian OS devices out there, making sure that 200 or so authors realise the difference is nothing compared to the sheer volume of end-users.

At the moment, this is still a theoretical problem, most people don’t realise that Series 60 is Symbian OS, and that “Chucky Egg” on their phone is the same as “Chucky Egg” on their friends P900. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just ports in the same way that Splinter Cell runs on both the Xbox and the Playstation… and the N-Gage.

The N-Gage is a good example of the problems that lie in wait with the jump to Symbian OS 9 (and the resultant jump to Series 60 v3, and UIQ v3). Everybody out there is smart enough to work out that an N-Gage is just a Series 60 phone, much like their Nokia 6600. So there should be nothing stopping that MMC game running my phone apart from Nokia being a bit possessive. There’s no extra circuitry, graphics card or twiddly bits.

Ah but the N-Gage is S60 version 1, and the 6600 is S60 version 2. But most of the games still run (apart from some palette problems) much to nobody’s surprise. The fun stuff of course is the jump to Symbian OS 9, when absolutely everything changes. Programs are going to have to be recompiled, you won’t simply be able to say “Series 60” on a product tag, but which version of Series 60. Given that Nokia don’t have a great big v1, v2 or v3 on the box, you’re probably going to have to list the model of the phone. We’re going to see lists of eighty Symbian phones with a little note that says, “choose your phone” before you discover if the author has cross compiled for your specific model (don’t laugh, it might just end up that way). Virgin Radio’s recently announced Radio Player is for Series 60 v2 and UIQ, and has a very nice (and long) list of compatible phones. Strange how the Nokia 6620 isn’t listed. Now is that because Virgin hasn’t heard of it, it’s not compatible, or they’ve never tested it? After all, they’ve got compatibility with the Arima U300 and that’s not even released yet!

And that’s before we’ve even asked how a lone author can test his application on the multitude of phones for each UI type.

Is it a problem now? That’s one for end-users to ask, but the potential for Symbian and its partners to slip up here is immense. Creating a vibrant third-party software ecosystem is one of the key areas that has made Palm OS such a success (and note that even in the new Linux based OS they’re promising to release “real soon now” it will still run Palm OS 1.0 based applications. Microsoft is moving towards an identical platform for Windows based Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones. Meanwhile Symbian seems to be slowly fragmenting itself into every market space, with no Rosetta Stone to move between them.

If they’re not careful, this could be the Achilles heel everyone else exploits…