The WDN Symbian DevZone - Sony Ericsson P800 Application Proclamation

by Richard Bloor, February 17, 2003

The winning applications in the Sony Ericsson’s P800 Application Proclamation were announced last month. This week we review the Proclamation with Mikael Nerde Sony Ericsson’s Developer Program Relations Manager and take a look at two developers who were encouraged to develop their first commercial application for Symbian OS.


The goal of the Sony Ericsson Application Proclamation was to find high quality applications which would help drive sales of the P800, while also encouraging developers who had not previously worked with the Symbian OS to add it to their development portfolio. While the number of applications Sony Ericsson judged as deserving winner status was perhaps less than they had hoped for all but one of the developers was new to the Symbian OS and in that respect the competition was a success.



Reflecting back on the Application Proclamation, Mikael Nerde Developer Program Relations Manager said, "We hit a couple of bumps early on. We got some negative feedback from developers because we applied a technical support fee to entering the competition, and in many ways I think we launched the competition too soon. At the start of the competition SDK’s and tools were not as ready as we would have liked and there was a very limited supply of phones. Unfortunately this took something away from the result we should have had. The final winners however, I think, are a good mix of applications and are of a very good quality." Two of the winning developers were ICOM Consulting and 12Planet.

ICOM Consulting International (http://www.icomcons.com) is a New York based company specializing in Software application design and development. In addition to serving clients with custom applications and services they have also developed a product called MobiPassword (http://www.mobipassword.com) which allows a PDA user to securely store their passwords and, when the PDA is connected to a PC, deliver the passwords to a service or system log on, in effect automating secure authentication.




Sample MobiPassword screen shots



The Sony Ericsson Application Proclamation appealed to ICOM because of their perception of how the PDA market is evolving. Drago Boykov ICOM’s CEO commented that “we think that smartphones are the future of PDAs, and the P800 in particular is the brightest example of a smartphone around, with the best set of features available today and enormous potential. It’s an excellent way for Sony Ericsson to enter into the new age of smartphones.”

ICOM had already developed versions of MobiPassword for both the Palm and Microsoft Pocket PC prior to undertaking a port to the Symbian OS and the P800. “We were delighted to find that Symbian OS does not in any way offer less than Windows CE, so porting our flagship application, which is pretty sophisticated, from Windows CE to Symbian did not pose any substantial problems. Of course, there were issues, basically we had to rewrite the GUI, but altogether it was a relatively easy process” said Drago.

MobiPassword is a C++ application and as a result ICOM used the Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE to develop the application. “Code Warrior is a very good Development Environment in both the Palm and Symbian OS versions. The fact that it was a very familiar development environment for us definitely helped” said Drago. “Still we did have lots of new things to learn because of the differences between the SDK for P800 and the Palm OS SDK. For example, multi-tasking, memory management, relational database support and the object orientated nature of the Symbian OS.”

Compared to the other operating systems they have developed for, Drago feels that “Symbian OS is a worthy competitor for both Palm OS and Windows CE. The attention given by Symbian OS to issues such as memory management and freeing up memory resources in critical events is a real step forward.” The Application Proclamation also wetted ICOM’s appetite for the P800 and Symbian OS. They have already started porting MobiPassword to Series 60. In addition ICOM have developed a number of games and are currently porting three Palm OS games, MiniPolis, Qubix, and Brush Roller, to the P800 and will probably follow with Series 60 and 80 ports as well.

12Planet (http://www.12planet.com) is a French developer specializing in Instant Communication server solutions who have built up an impressive client base, including Coca-Cola, Toyota and JP Morgan Chase, for their Instant Messaging, Chat and Forum servers. They recognized that the next generation of mobile phones would allow users to carry advanced interactive communication applications everywhere they go, literally unleashing the full power of those applications. “We wanted to expand our IM solutions to the mobile world, the SonyEricsson Developer Contest provided a good reason to start” commented Lei Jin, CEO of 12Planet.




Sample screen captures from 12Planet



As such 12Planet IM for Symbian is their first software application for the mobile market. 12Planet undertook the development in Java using Visual Café and Visual J++ in combination with the UIQ SDK, which was used mainly for unit testing. They encountered some initial set-up problems when configuring the emulator, as some of the environment variables did not seem to be set up when the SDK was installed. However these issues were resolved quickly with the assistance of the Sony Ericsson support team at Metrowerks and Lei noted that the service was “effective and useful”. Once these initial set up problems were resolved they found that the SDK worked well.

They were pleased with the Java support within Symbian OS. “We have developed our own library of GUI classes from the basic AWT APIs” said Lei “this allowed us to overcome the lack of advanced graphical widgets in PersonalJava. Of course, there are some restrictions on the memory size, the number of threads, which you don’t have in PC or Server applications that we needed to considered while writing the application, but they were acceptable. Actually, overall we were pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of writing applications for Symbian OS.”

As a result of this work 12Planet are also considering migrating to other Symbian OS User Interfaces and are reviewing the market requirements before undertaking any development. “It may also make sense to work more closely with Symbian directly in order to make the port of the applications really transparent from one interface to another.” said Lei.

A demonstration version of 12Planets IM Client will be available on their web site shortly.

Overall the total number of applications submitted suggested to Mikael that there is a “considerable interest in the P800 and Symbian OS amongst application developers”. Looking forward Sony Ericsson have already started to think about future competitions. “I can not say exactly when we will run our next competition, but it is likely to be open to everyone and free to enter, although the prizes may be more modest.” said Mikael, “In the meantime developers have access to the development tools and our technical support services. The next few months will see the P800 rolled out on a global basis, as it does so we hope to see numerous new cool, innovative, easy-to-use and practical applications being developed for Symbian OS.”

About the WDN Symbian Editor, 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 symbian@wirelessdevnet.com.

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