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Symbian DevZone - Exposium03 - Show Report - Part 2
by Richard Bloor, May 12, 2003
At Exposium03 Symbian gave a tantalizing glimpse of the future of enterprise applications. In this second part of our Exposium03 coverage we take a look at what Symbian are doing to engage enterprise more actively and some of the software developers who were at the show.
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While Exposium03 is certainly a showcase for Symbian and its licensees it is also very much a place for developers to show their applications and network with licensees and operators. Therefore, it was not surprising that a large number of software developers attended either in their own right or on the Nokia or Sony Ericsson stands.
Judging by the download traffic Opera provided the hottest release of the show with the announcement of their browser for Series 60. Nokia, unlike Sony Ericsson, don’t seem to have embraced Opera’s Small Screen Rendering software and the browser is an additional purchase for Nokia 7650 or Nokia 3650 owners. The Opera browser certainly makes accessing the web on a Series 60 phone practical and the formatting of pages by the Small Screen Rending technology is impressive.
PsiNT have been one of the most active developers in the Symbian space with some innovative applications and they had their own booth and a presence on the Application Pavilion. They brought beta versions of their Infrared remote control and mini GPRS applications for the P800 to the show. I was most interested in discovering that their consumer software sales only account for about 40% of the companies activities, the rest being contract development and tailoring applications for Symbian licensees and operators.
The Applications Pavilion showcased an interesting range of companies. There were those best known for their consumer applications like PsiNT, Bitween, Epocware, MobiMate and Electric Pocket. While others like Anthropics, Cognima and Trust Link are focused at specific application segments.
In many ways the presence of Electric Pocket and MobiMate, who to date have primarily been Palm or Pocket PC developers, shows how Symbian OS is becoming important for all mobile software developers.
Cognima were showing their Replicate™ application which in many ways is similar to a number of the synchronization applications shown on the Enterprise Pavilion, except Replicate focuses on the consumer market. Simon East, Cognima’s CEO, gave me a demonstration of the systems capabilities. These included replicating a phones contact details so they could also be accessed by the owner via the web and a photo sharing application that is a significant improvement over the current systems for saving and publishing photos on a web page.
Enterprise was another major theme of Exposium03. The first Symbian OS device the Nokia 9210 Communicator was clearly a professional smartphone and Sony Ericsson have been making much of the Enterprise capabilities of the P800. While Symbian have partnered with a number of companies supplying enterprise applications they have to date not really had a formal, visible approach to enterprise solutions.
This year Symbian came out with a strong enterprise focus. They announced the formation of the SEAC (Symbian Enterprise Advisory Council) which is supported by a range of industry heavy weights. The Enterprise Pavilion also served to show that vendors supplying all the key tools for enterprise mobility support Symbian OS.
Remote email solutions dominated the offerings on the Enterprise Pavilion. Psion Software used the show to launch their Transcend Mail application, the only one of the PIM replication solution presently focused solely on Symbian OS smartphones. Two years in development Transcend Mail has been designed to address the cost and complexity problems that have held back widespread adoption of remote mail. The demonstration I was given by Head of Strategic Marketing, Steve Maynard, was one of the most complete uses of wireless I saw at the show employing not only GPRS but wireless LAN technology. The demonstration was certainly impressive with data amended on the server taking about 8 seconds to be reflected on the Nokia 7650.
Another exhibitor that caught my eye was Eizel, who are currently being purchased by Nokia. Eizel’s technology in simple terms formats and optimizes PIM data, web content and a number of standard document types for both the limited bandwidth of mobile data connections and for the limited device display size. It does this two ways. Firstly images are optimized on Eizel’s server so that they are sized to fit the target screen before transmission. For documents they take an interesting approach by abbreviating the text, for example by substituting words with their SMS equivalent. This again reduced the data transmitted but also increases the number of words you can get onto a small smartphone screen. The user can control how aggressive the abbreviation is. Using Eizel’s technology also means that email attachments, in a number of standard document formats, can be read using the device’s browser. They are planning to add the ability to download the email to the device in a future version. The idea of receiving optimized web content certainly appeals, not only will it reduce the cost of data traffic but it allows web resource to be mobilized efficiently with no redevelopment cost.
fastmobile whose fastxt we covered earlier in the year were also on the Enterprise Pavilion focusing on their fastchat service. Originally launched as a consumer application the main change made to meet enterprise expectations was apparently to tone down the interface.
fastchat leads neatly to the glimpse, given during one of the enterprise presentations, of technology Symbian, undoubtedly with external partners, is working to deliver later this year. This is on-demand and presence-based conferencing. We have all probably experienced the frustration of trying to get a group of people together for an urgent meeting at short notice, particularly when the people you want to involve are highly mobile. You call them or their PA, perhaps look up their availability in Exchange or Groupwise. It is often a time consuming process, made worse by the fact that diaries are usually not up to date. The end result is that the meeting can shift two or three times as a persons true availability slowly get determined – like pealing an onion and just as uncomfortable. Now imagine doing the same thing like this, selecting the people you want involved from a contacts list, immediately see their current availability and then either initiate a conference call or request that when they are available a conference call is created. The indication was that the first part of this technology would be announced before the end of the year. I can also see that there would be a demand for this functionality in the consumer domain as well. It will be interesting to see how this rolls out.
There was much more to Exposium03 than I have covered in these two show reports. Picking out highlights has been difficult. Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at some of the companies and products I have mentioned in more detail, as well as some I have not, such as Gate5 who are the subject of next weeks column.
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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