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Symbian DevZone - Developer Profile - SymbianWare
by Richard Bloor, April 21, 2003
SymbianWare like a number of companies currently creating applications for Symbian OS smartphones started life developing applications for the Psion Series 5. They recently won the Productivity section of Nokia’s 2002 Series 60 challenge and produced a Cebit guide for Nokia Germany. This week Richard looks at SymbianWare's growth and future with marketing manager Boris Raczynski.
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Based in Odesa, Ukraine SymbianWare was founded in 2000 by Sergey Simkovsky. His first product was an extended version of the built in Contact manager found on the Psion 5mx and Revo PDAs. The success of this product, although modest, confirmed to Sergey that there was a market for consumer applications on mobile devices, especially on those utilizing the Symbian OS.
SymbianWare really got going when the Nokia 9210 Communicator was released, the development team was enlarged and it has now grown to five developers. However while Sergey and his staff had the technical skills to create applications they realized that simply producing great software did not guarantee success. They had started forging a relationship with the German software shop Mobile2Day, through this Sergey met Boris Raczynski who owned SmartAppz a German web software marketing and retail company. Recognizing that there was synergy between their companies they started collaborating, they found the arrangement to be mutually beneficial and in July 2002 formally joined forces. Boris now dedicates all his efforts to promoting SymbianWare.
SymbianWare pride themselves on having a detailed technical knowledge of the Symbian OS. Stacker won them top prize in the Productivity section of Nokia’s 2002 Series 60 developer challenge and is a good illustration of their knowledge. “4 Mb of memory is not really enough for a phone like the Nokia 7650” commented Boris “particularly when we are planning to bring many of our applications to the Nokia 7650, and would like the user to be able to run them all on his device without thinking about disk space.” Similar to the compression applications which were common for PCs in the early 90’s Stacker compresses unused applications and some data files to about half their normal size. Technically complex the development of Stacker took sometime and effort, learning the intricacies of the core of Symbian OS. SymbianWare are also one of the few companies who have solved the so called “microphone bug” which has limited a number of attempts to write answer machine applications for Symbian OS smartphones. This feature meant that the caller could hear the sound picked up by the phone microphone while their message was being recorded.
Winning the Nokia S60 Challenge has brought a number of benefits. The ability to undertake product promotion thought events such as 3GSM with Nokia’s assistance has had obvious benefit for software sales, particularly with non-retail channels. They have also received several commissions for bespoke software development, including one from Nokia Germany for whom they developed an on device guide to Cebit 2003 to run on the Nokia 9210 and Nokia 7650.
While SymbianWare gets most of its direct sales from its own web they also use Handango and Mobile2Day. However the sales through these channels are relatively low when compared to the install base of available phones which could run their applications. To address this SymbianWare is actively marketing to distributors and publishers, particularly in the German market. This way they hope to be able to make their product visible to phone purchasers who may not be active Internet users.
Perhaps the two greatest challenges SymbianWare has encountered are application pricing and finding developers.
With Internet retailing Smartphone software is competing in a global market so setting software prices is a singular challenge. A reasonable price in one market may be seen as to high in another but too low to maximize revenue somewhere else. The market is also developing, so too higher a price could limit sales, while too low might create unreasonable future expectations. SymbianWare addresses this problem by analyzing competitive products including those for platforms like Palm and Pocket PC and balancing this information with the project complexity and development time to determine the final sales price. They then use limited time promotions to also help to gauge the market perception of the products price. Ultimately there is an element of guess work but the fact that they have not had to significantly adjust product prices suggest they have a good formula.
SymbianWare has also encountered perhaps the most critical problem in achieving growth in the Symbian software sector and that is developer resources. It is currently difficult to find developers who are experienced in writing for Symbian OS. SymbianWare have taken a pragmatic approach to this problem and look for developers with good skills in C++ and then train them within SymbianWare. Initially they tried using a workshops approach to training new staff but as the company has grown and now has some very experienced developers they take a far more direct approach with mentored on the job training. Initially staff are taught the basic principals of Symbian OS C++ coding and then are given a real, but straightforward project to undertake. A more experienced developer then analyses the code they produce. They provide feedback on non-optimal parts of the program, providing guidance on everything from style to specific technical problems.
Looking to the future SymbianWare is continuing to extend its product range, both with more applications for Series 80 and Series 60 devices and has commenced porting applications to UIQ. Their aim is to have versions of their software for all the Symbian OS devices on the market. They don’t intend specializing in any particular type of software products but build a range from utilities such as Stacker through PIM applications to games. “We have many ideas for future applications.” Boris said “We use Symbian devices in both our business and personal lives, this means we are always seeing what functions would enhance the devices and where we can add value. We also listen to the feedback of our users and beta testers, which we believe is a very important part or planning what new applications or enhancements we will work on.” Their latest application, Blacklist for Nokia 3650/Nokia 7650, was developed as a direct result of customer feedback. BlackList provides a selective call baring function for Series 60.
Boris recognizes that the smartphone market is very young and there is a degree of uncertainty particularly for a small company specializing in one section of the market. “We are planning to continue developing for Symbian OS based devices.” Said Boris “Its an environment that our developers are happy working in. We have looked at some of the other platforms and they simply don’t have the stability and functionality of Symbian OS. We want to build great applications and you need a great platform for them to run on.”
About the WDN Symbian Editor, Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor is a freelance writer and editor with 18 years experience in the IT industry as a developer, analyst and latterly Project Manager with a particularly focus on software testing. Richard has been involved with the Symbian OS since 1995 and has been writing about it for the last 3 years.
Richard is also an associate with System Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at symbian@wirelessdevnet.com.
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