The Future of the Smartphone Through The Eyes Of Sony Ericsson

GoConnect · Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 12:12 am Post subject:

The problem with Symbian from our point of view, as application developer, is that each brand of Symbian phone has its unique user interface. We then have to customise our development for each Symbian brand. We came across the same issue with m-Vision (www.m-vision.tv), then Direct Assist (www.directassist.com.au). It is a nightmare to allocate R&D resources across different brands and then to update the development is another drain on resources. Windows Mobile does not present this problem as the user interface is the same across all brands. Each of our development for an application will work across all WM brrands. In the long termWindows Mobile's standard front end across all brands will encourage more applications to be developed on WM devices. It is just a fact of life that R&D resources are limited and costly and we all have to learn to make the most from limited resources.
As to Sony, they stuck with Beta, not VHs, then what happened? The best may not always be the most market acceptable. The most user friendly application will always win.

traxer · Smartphone Neophyte Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 1

I like my P910, mainly because of the various input methods. Sure it's a bit clumsy to use without the pen, but i guess this will change with the P990. The usability is good (the QWERTY keybord is ok, some contrabass players might have problems, though). With a little hacking linking to OpenXchange works satisfactory.

Here are some of the things I hate:
* The GUI APIs, namely UIQ, Series 60, Series 80, Series 90 and what ever may emerge from the sick mind of a misguided marketing monster. Is it really that hard to understand that you don't need to change the interface when I change the implementation. I guess not, unless you think locking in developers is just as good an idea as locking in users.
* Exception handling a.k.a. "Leaving". The difference to the standard C++ exception handling is the necessity to explicitly create a function for catching and the ignorance of that function. I'm not an expert on implementing compilers, but I don't think Symbian gained much resources by their method.
* Memory Management. I've heard roumors about beeing able to overload the 'new' operator. Are these lies? Did they get through to Symbian?
* String handles. No comment on that one, I might get a heart condition.

I guess one might rightfully accuse Symbian of reinventing the wheel, just that their wheel comes in four flavours, they are all rectangular in shape and none of them can be used outside of Symbianeese.

It certainly looks like most of the mistakes they made are copied from Microsoft, they also had horrible APIs (win32api, mfc). This has changed a bit with .NET. The point is, however: I don't know any company (except Microsoft), that can afford to do the mistakes that Microsoft does. Either Symbian will learn, or they will be out of business within 6 years.