Review: How Smartphones Work
Score:
77%
Version Reviewed: 2006
Subtitled "Symbian and the Mobile Phone Industry", this could equally well be thought of as "The Gospel according to Symbian". By which I mean that its principal aim is to explain where Symbian are coming from and their way of thinking.
One thing it's not, despite the title, is a tutorial book on how to do things on your smartphone. From the back cover: "How Smartphones Work" is an introduction to Symbian and the many companies involved in the business of mobile phone creation. It looks at the inception of Symbian OS and explains the concept of smartphones, why an advanced operating system is required in a mobile environment, and how the creation of Symbian brings the mobile industry together."
The back cover also proclaims "This revolutionary book is a unique insight into Symbian and the smartphone industry" - stripping away the 'revolutionary' bit, which is pure marketing, the 'insight' bit is most appropriate. There's historical and background material here which is quite illuminating. The target audience are professionals who simply want to know what makes Symbian tick and why they should make Symbian OS-powered smartphones a priority in their lives. Now, admittedly, I'm coming to the book from the geek/technical angle and with years of existing Symbian knowledge, but even I found sections that were genuinely interesting and useful.
Highlights of the 140 pages of editorial for me were the chapter on the development of mobile telephony (including helpful diagrams and photos of the inside of a Sony Ericsson P800), the overview of Symbian OS architecture, the chapter on network operators and their needs and the chapter on smartphone electronics. I didn't like the over-emphasis on Java (J2ME) in the development chapter, at the expense of being restricted to brief mentions of other, more efficient runtimes, such as OPL, Python, etc.
The 10 page glossary and 50 page appendix with brief specifications of all Symbian OS-powered smartphones are handy to have but not worth buying the book for - the same information can be gotten online instantly for free, from a number of sites.
But it's the main text that's the point of the book. In the introduction, Symbian's CFO says that the book doesn't have to be read as a whole, but rather can be dipped into according to what you'd like to read about. Which is as it should be, because this isn't a continuous whole written by one author, but rather a collection of essays by over a dozen experts within Symbian. Phil Northam has done a good job of binding the essays into a single volume without obvious duplication.
'How Smartphones Work' isn't perfect but, once you get past the slightly misleading title, it's a good read, genuinely interesting and not overly-technical, and it has earned itself a place on my own bookshelf.
Links: The book's Table of Contents
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at