The WDN Symbian DevZone... Richard Interviews Jari Kiuru VP for Product Development, Digia

by Richard Bloor, May 06, 2002

Since the formation of Symbian a number of companies have grown up around it to provide extended services and expertise. Many of these companies are members of Symbian formal partners program. I recently caught up with Jari Kiuru VP for Product Development at Digia who are a Symbian Competence Center as well as a Training Partner.

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WDN: Jari I noticed that Digia are currently advertising several positions, presumably this means that business is good?

Jari: While the global economy, as we all know, has not been buoyant we are seeing strong growth in the Symbian market. We are very much committed to keeping pace with this growth and to do so we are looking for more skilled staff.

WDN: So what are Digia's main activities at the moment?

Jari: Basically we have 2 main business lines. Firstly we are working with tier 1 device manufactures to assist them in bring new smartphones to market. Secondly we are developing technologies and architecture components based around the Symbian OS. These products complement the OS to enable device development as well as assisting 3rd party application developers.

We have recognized that before you can deliver applications you need to build smartphones. And part of building smartphones is having good tools to facilitate their development and this is really where we have started.

WDN: The first product you launched was Digia AppTest, what was the reason behind its development?

Jari: We originally developed Digia AppTest for internal use, in fact all our tools have originated from internal needs. In our work testing is obviously important, but the process of rerunning tests can become very laborious and is not something that any test engineer enjoys. So we developed Digia AppTest to allow our engineers to record their tests and then rerun them, while varying aspects of the device, with little manual intervention. Also we recognized that being able to run tests both within the smartphone emulator and on devices, often being tested in remote locations, was important. So AppTest allows tests to be run on both environments and to be distributed wirelessly if necessary.

WDN: Digia AppTest has been launched for the Nokia 7650, but not the 9210, why is that?

Jari: Our first version was in fact for the 9210 but we believe the 7650, in fact the whole Series 60 interface, will sell in significant volume, selling far more than the 9210. So we launched it for the 7650 because we feel the demand will be much higher than a 9210 product.

Interesting though the first company that contacted us after the Digia AppTest launch asked about 9210. So we expect that we will release the 9210 version at sometime but we don't have a definite date at the moment.

WDN: Any plans for a version for UIQ and the Sony Ericsson P800?

Jari: We are planning to support all significant Symbian OS based devices and device categories. The interest in UIQ at the Symbian Developers Expo was very strong and I can see UIQ being highly successful. We will definitely be supporting it in Digia AppTest.

WDN: You announced a number of new tools at the 3GSM in February. Can you tell me a little more about them?

Jari: Yes, we launched 4 new tools as part of our Technology Factory program that extend the capabilities of the Symbian OS.

Digia™HTTPStack extends the Symbian OS implementation of the Http stack and we see it as an important enabler for many communications applications.

With Digia™GraphicsAccelerator we have significantly improved on Symbian's core graphics APIs without effecting system integrity and multitasking so that other tasks can continue.

Digia™MobileMessenger will provide any Series 60 smartphone the capability of connecting to a Jabber instant messaging server over GPRS or GSM. We have implemented most of the standard features include buddy lists, presence information, and the ability to have several chat sessions simultaneously. In addition we will be providing the ability to plug in additional messaging protocols such as Wireless Village.

Digia™XMLParser will be useful in any application that utilizes XML data, in fact we wrote XMLParser for the Navigator product that we also launched at 3GSM. In Navigator we use XMLParser to handle the navigation and business information downloaded from the servers.

Overall we are very proud of these products and, while we have no independent benchmark, our view is that they are all very efficient in their use of device memory and processor which is obviously important to the new generation of constrained smartphones.

WDN: Navigator is obviously a very different product to the Component Factory products.

Jari: Yes, Navigator is a product that enables location based information to be delivered to Symbian smartphones.

WDN: What initiated the development of Navigator?

Jari: We had identified a market for this type of service and at the same time we were contacted by the Finnish company, Genimap, who already had a web based service. We realized we had similar visions so we decided to co- operate to develop Navigator.

WDN: Why did Genimap choose Digia rather than existing an company with mapping experience, TomTom for example?

Jari: Well Genimap were looking for an on-line product and the existing products load all the data with the application when it is installed. They recognized that we were able to provide the depth of knowledge of the Symbian OS needed to do this development. We also have a highly professional team of user interaction experts at Digia and thus we believe we’re able to produce a very pleasant user experience with our applications, regardless of their specific usage.

WDN: So what products are you looking towards releasing in the future?

Jari: In terms of applications we are looking at taking advantage of the 7650's imaging capabilities. The 7650's camera is a very compelling technology and we are looking at ways of harnessing this and broadening the user experience.

As for the tools we have a number of items from our component architectures which we are looking at releasing, but we shall time them together with forthcoming smart phone releases from tier 1 manufacturers.

About the "WDN Symbian Guy" Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier work was largely in design and development of commercial and manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on development and test management of government systems.

Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.

Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.