Part of the problem isn't the raw numbers, but the perception of each platform. With a closed ecosystem, the iPhone is not as vulnerable in the press to claims of “rampant piracy” as to other platforms. Given the Nintendo DS and PSP warez scene, I'd say they were at similar levels, but the PSP carries the “I'm a pirate target” flag while the DS keeps relatively quiet.

Nokia had to deal with this in the first generation N-Gage and never really solved the problem beyond “you might not be able to connect to the Arena with a pirate copy” but the machine was tarred and feathered and never recovered from the stigma.

So what can be done? This is a tough area, because there is no magic wand, and the rule is simple. No matter how big your team, or how much you invest, there are billions of people in the world, and enough free time to crack any system. And it takes just one to break it, and the copy is then released for everyone. The internet is rather good at copying digital data once it's hosted in a single place, you know.

Something for authors and developers to consider is that the piracy scene has created a phenomenally efficient distribution system – if you want to get something out there, the quickest way to do so is have it pirated. The catch of course (rather like the NHS) is that these copies are free at the point of download; so to have some sort of income stream, the cash and the user need to be separated a little bit further down the line.

World of Warcraft does this really well. It doesn't care how you get the client software, because once you have it you'll be logging on and paying a monthly subscription.

Ad-supported software also follows this money. Yes, it's a much smaller income per user, but it does work and uses piracy to your advantage. And ad-supported is something that the iPhone ecosystem does very well – witness Google's purchase of AdMob recently as evidence that there is money out there.

Or you could go down the route of having some in-game credit system which would allow a virtual currency to be spent and traded. Second Life has a huge economy built on this principle and many social games (e.g. FarmVille on Facebook) have the ability to buy additional credits to help you advance in the game at a faster rate.

Yes, piracy is around but the answer isn't as simple as “let's just stop it.” Rather than that, it's time for the industry to get creative alongside all those people who remember that buying a developed application helps you get more applications developed.

-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2009.

It amuses me when I hear of, for example, Apple blocking a certain application from making it into the App Store for some dodgy anti-competitive reason. So, for example, they famously blocked the (presumably) professionally programmed Google Voice, while simultaneously, in just one week, allowing ten (more) fart apps, a hundred hastily programmed 'reference' and ultra-niche utility apps and a thousand home-made games of dubious scope and playability. Which is kind of where the problem lies.

Now, I've nothing against Apple's policy - it's their App Store and they can let in, and keep out, anything they want, whenever they want. But picture the poor user of an Apple or (in this case) Nokia smartphone. Making a beeline for the App (Ovi) Store icon on their brand new device, they're bombarded with thousands (in the iPhone's case) or hundreds (in Ovi store's case) of items which essentially offer little but distraction from the really high quality content that is in there somewhere.

The iPhone App Store tries to help out by providing 'Top 25' (/50) lists (free/commercial/highest grossing), but the first two of these tend to get taken over by the current 'joke novelties' or by whichever commercial apps have been on 'sale' most recently, respectively. Outside of the top 25 charts, it's very hard to find exactly what you're looking for. So, for example, search for 'golf', or 'diet', or 'fitness', or whatever, and you simply get shown a seemingly random selection of 10 matches. Out of hundreds, if not thousands of possibles.

The Nokia Ovi Store is far more primitive still, with just a 'recommended' pane of items and a selection of (not entirely believable - e.g. 'most popular') filters. On a number of occasions, I've been looking for a particular application that I know should be in the Ovi Store and yet it doesn't show up on (the first few pages of) any of the content lists or in search results.

The problem is, you see, one of numbers. Imagine you 'fancy reading a really good new book'. You wander into a Waterstones (in the UK) - note that this is a fine bookchain and I've nothing against them - and are presented with a dozen rooms over two or three floors, with just about every book still in print somewhere on its shelves. If you're going there for a specific quality book, then it'll take you a while to find it - and if you're going there hoping to get a few ideas for what to try next then you'll be utterly overwhelmed. 

Similarly at the supermarket. You head down to the jam aisle to 'get some marmalade' and are presented with 33 different alternatives, including about 20 subtly differently flavoured and quality-graded variants under the supermarket's own 'brand'. Which one do you go for?

In each case, the chances are that you'll actually walk away, since the sheer choice is too much. Or at the very least walk away with a purchase but also a sense of unease that you didn't really end up with the best product for you.

Now imagine walking into a local village bookstore - we have one near my house. One room, only about 1000 book titles stocked and a viable way to find out what's new, what's popular and what's potentially interesting without being overwhelmed. Imagine walking into your local village grocery store. Again, one room. You ask for marmalade - they stock two brands. You make your pick - that was easy.

What's needed, I contend, is far more draconian control of what makes it into each smartphone application store. Far more heavy handed quality control. What it needs are human QA controllers, discarding submitted applications (or at least filing them away in a deeply hidden 'Other' section, from which they only be accessed by the public in answer to a specific query): "No, sorry, not allowed into the main store, its interface is too amateurish". "No, only makes joke sounds, will reflect badly on the platform". "No, only of interest to about 100 people in the world - too specialist". And so on.

The applications that do make it through this severe QA would be those that look professional, serve a real purpose, aren't too specialist, are tightly coded, are well behaved, and so on. The 'presented' contents of each app store would then solely consist of the very best for each platform - no joke apps, no pointless screensavers, no 'Model X train wheel size calculators' [apologies if you own a model X train and quite like the idea!], no specialist reference apps in 20 different languages.

With such a scheme, the iPhone App Store would end up with 'only' about 1000 apps immediately presented, a far more manageable number. With such a scheme, the Nokia Ovi Store would end up (from its current catalogue) with about 150 apps immediately presented, a number which could be browsed through by newcomers in five minutes at most.

And yes, 'long tail' advocates, note that all other applications could still be 'there' in the background, available should a user dig deep and want something really specific (by name or topic). But new users and the man in the street shouldn't be exposed to the raw, seething pool of content that seems to be de rigueur in modern application stores.

Such drastic quality control would be labour intensive*, yes, at the manufacturer/platform-coordinator level, but I reckon the results would be well worth it, with more people happier at making decent discoveries and purchases, rather than recoiling from the whole app store idea in confusion and disappointment.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 19 Nov 2009

*Ovi Store, should you be looking for a QA controller along these lines, I'm available!

"But it's all relative. Critics of phone cameras over the last five years have rightly pointed out that in anything other than optimal light conditions, a standalone camera with far bigger lens with take far better photos than (even) an N95. And, taking back to back photos using the N95 and the N97 phones featured here, I was struck how advances in camera processing algorithms in the intervening years have meant that the N95's images are definitely inferior, on average. 

And yet, we're now spoiled. The Nokia N86, with its focus (pun intended) on photography, the Samsung i8910 HD, the new Sony Ericsson Satio, and others, all 8 megapixels or more and with bigger sensors, bigger apertures, brighter flashes, and so on, have all provided us with a new benchmark. Whereas claiming that the N95's camera could replace a standalone was only true under certain conditions, this new breed of phone camera gets us a whole step closer to the claim being valid."

Read on

Yes there are (arguably) operational reasons for these omissions. Each design team for each model is going to make their own call on what their user group will want, what they'll be using the machine for, and they will also have a budget (of time and money). Put all that in balance, and choosing which 50 or so applications ship on a device isn't always a clear-cut decision.

But it shouldn't need to be this way. There is a lot of effort put into the customisation options on a device, from your wallpaper and ringtones to the application icons and screen fades and wipes. So why not have the same ability for your second line applications?

It's a given that apps like the web browser and messaging are going to be included – I'm more interested in what happens with apps such as Podcasting. The long term users looking to upgrade are going to notice the missing items and will likely be put off from moving; while the new users may not even know that these other apps exist. Whether that's a good or a bad thing can be discussed but it's not as if Nokia want people to think that their modern phones do less than previous designs.

So let me point out something and then suggest a way forward. It's not too difficult for programmers to handle one application running over a number of 3rd Edition and 5th Edition handsets. So why does it appear to be such a traumatic problem from the Nokia design teams?

Here's my suggestion. When you first switch your phone on, there already are some set-up things that have to be done. The date and time are obvious ones, as is setting up email. So why not have a (likely widget-driven) application that lists all those optional components, such as Podcasting, Nokia Messaging, Ovi Chat, and so on. You could even use it to promote the Ovi Store and certain third party applications – all with the requisite disclaimer. And behind it you have 'generic' versions of these not quite core applications which you know will happily run on all the devices out there. 

Yes there would still be people at the manugfacturer going “we've not tested this to the nth degree so let's not flag it up as an option” because they know users won't read the disclaimer... but sometimes you have to make a bet when you don't have a perfect hand.

If you remove an application, you diminish the phone. Why you would want to do that remains a mystery to me. But by putting these applications back in, and via a customisation option that puts the user not only in control of their own hardware, but gives them the personalisation choices that make a phone into their phone, you create a far stronger emotional bond than a simple cookie cutter approach to the built in apps.

A small team of developers, sitting alongside each handset development team, checking compatibility and ensuring the widget used to drive this stays up to date – it shouldn't be too much to ask. Should it?

-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2009.

Listen

“Every new Nokia will be connected to this system... and there's nothing you can do to stop it Mr Bond.”

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At the start of any new technology, the money is always made in selling shovels, the tools that are needed to get people involved. Time passes and the technology matures and while people still want shovels, it's not at the top of their list. What is at the top of the list now is the eye candy, the sexiness, and the graphics that slide around the screen nicely. It's why app stores and third party developers are important in the modern ecosystem.

You'd be hard pressed to argue that Apple is not sexy in the modern smartphone world. And, while the Symbian Foundation is making noises about updating the user interface to something more slick in the next version (quick, make a reference to the story of the Ugly Duckling), their strategy up until now has been to create the best tool in the world at the Operating System level, leaving it up to the licencees to implement the UI. Time has of course left us with S60 as the dominant UI, but while it was sufficient a couple of years ago, now it looks more like a shovel than a beautiful garden.

What can the Symbian Foundation do? Well they're showing promise that something sexy is coming along by flashing a bit of leg with their UI Concept video. On top of that there are more hints every day that there are amazing things in the roadmap, but much of these are tools in the SDK's and tool-chains for the developers to create good third party applications. Will the Symbian Foundation make it easy enough for developers to make sexy applications?

The problem could be that these tools and the existing platforms aren't sexy enough to attract new developers. Having a few poster child applications is a good start, but the Symbian Foundation not only needs to make the tools, but prove that these tools can be used (by others) to create the eye-catching applications. They're going to have to bootstrap a new app economy, with lots of razzamattazz and showbizness. And I'm wondering if they have that in them.

Ewan Spence

"All of which is not to defend every decision made by the S60 user interface teams over the last few years. The v20 update, with its kinetic scrolling in every menu, dialog and pane, is clearly a whole heap more intuitive than the 'scrollbar' driven system still used today on the Nokia 5800. And some of the application interfaces are downright disjointed - for example the Options/Actions split in both Web and the Camera apps. But the end result is something which is still very usable - if not perfect. There's simply too much heritage and too much functions to radically overhaul the UI without throwing things away. I'm guessing that Symbian^4 in a year or so's time will be the point where there's a whole new interface and hoping that not too much of the existing functionality gets ditched"

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In this podcast we cover:    

• SEE 2009 Extras - Nokia 6788 and EKA2 kernel
   
• Ovi Store re-downloads
  
  
• Google Mobile Search with voice recognition
    
• Opera 10 Mobile Symbian release
   
  
• Symbian UI concept video
   
  
• iPlayer update to version 2.5
   

Got a question or a topic you would like us to ponder and discuss in the next podcast? Got some feedback from us (love it or hate it)? Get in touch and let us know.

Some people have reported problems playing the podcasts via RSS. If your MP3 'loops back', can you let us (Rafe) know? We need some data points in order to be able to solve the problem. Thanks.

You can also follow the coverage on @aas on Twitter.

"Be in no doubt that the N-Gage is a failure. And it's not a failure of ideas - it's a failure of implementation, support and addressing the needs of the consumer. And as Nokia's first foray into a software and service bites the dust, they'd better learn the lessons of N-Gage pretty quickly."

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"Also revealed is the microSD slot - with card swapping now infrequent on modern devices, hiding this potential dust trap away inside the back cover is fine by me. It could even be argued that the card itself is now not quite so vital, with most Symbian-powered phones now coming with substantial amounts of internal flash memory (of which more later). Also of note is that the N97 mini hides its antennae (GPS, 3G etc) underneath plastic, while the N97 leaves them exposed on the surface - yet more evidence that the N97 mini hardware is very much a second iteration on the basic design. (There will be more on GPS performance in a future review part.)"

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In this podcast we cover:    

• Q3 Smartphone figures from Canalys
   
• Fujitsu and Quic join the board of the Symbian Foundation
  
  
• SEE 2009 retrospective and media reaction (Rafe rants a bit)
    
• N97 v20 firmware comments and thoughts from Steve
   
  
• Closure on N-Gage - thoughts and comments from Ewan and Steve

SEE 2009 is a heavily developer and platform community focused event. If you're looking for consumer coverage you may prefer the Nokia World 2009 tour videos.

Further SEE 2009 multimedia content is available in our podcasts from the show floor.

I would like to thank the man behind the camera, Ewan MacLeod, for his assistance (filming and editing) in making this video. Ewan's recently launched the Mobile Industry Review newsletter, which is well worth subscribing too.

Part 1 covers around two third of the show floor. In  part 2 of the video, which will be available early next week, we'll cover the remaining part of the show floor and draw some show conclusions.

"Just like the rest of the AAS readership, I've been having my own hardware dilemmas. I'm not blind and I can read the tea leaves, spot the signs in the sky, test the wind of change, and so on. There's an industry wide trend towards large, media-friendly touchscreens, driven by the excitement around the Apple iPhone. Yes, yes, Windows Mobile and Symbian (in the Nokia 7710) had large touchscreens first, by several years, but you can't argue with the fact that Apple popularised the concept and made it practical for the mainstream"

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