Symbian Summit Tokyo

I attended the Symbian Summit Tokyo last week. The timing was good–the marketplace for cell phone operating systems has never been more interesting. Google announced its open source OS Android last November; then Nokia announced that it was acquiring the majority of the outstanding shares of Symbian last month and planned to open source the Symbian OS. And the week before this conference, Apple released its 3G iPhone, complete with a compelling developer SDK and enterprise strategy.

Symbian Summit Tokyo 2008 at the Westin Hotel in Ebisu

So I was curious to see what the response would be to these various developments, at a show hosted by Symbian.

It was a mixed bag. The conference was completely full–overbooked, actually, as they had overflow from the main keynote in 3 different locations. But it was hard to detect any enthusiasm (although, to be fair, it was a Japanese business event).

The gathering was more heavily weighted to suits rather than developers. There was a developer track but the presentations were thinly disguised ads for the training courses offered by the companies the instructors worked for. The content was a little thin as well–fairly elementary stuff like how to build a project and control structures. The Westin Hotel has these nice fancy conference rooms with the pitchers of water and lush thick carpets and nice desks. There were more than a few people in the “Symbian Cooking School” completely sacked out, head down on a blue book, asleep. My guess is that some of them were developers trucked down from NTT Docomo, the primary sponsor of the event. I didn’t stick around to ask, though. I did grab a free copy of the blue book on my way out.

Nigel Clifford, CEO Symbian

More interesting was the keynote presentation by Nigel Clifford, Symbian CEO. It was very clear that he was being cautious about discussing the Nokia acquisition, as the deal has not completely cleared regulatory approval and the structure of the new Symbian Foundation is just beginning to be figured out. But Clifford did say that he expects the conversion to open source will happen completely within 2 years. It obviously will take time for them to do the code audits and make sure that any licensed technology is not part of the open source release, and make sure all the legal aspects are taken care of.

His mention of the license fee reduction to nothing as a result of this brought only the faintest of smiles to the attendees seated around me. There was no applause.

But I felt Symbian did do a great job of presenting its technical roadmap. The satellite session held in the opposite corners of the exhibitors room made for noisy sessions (especially for those of us hooked up to the radio simulcast translations), but these were the best parts of the day.

The Symetric Multi-Processing and Symbian presentation (PDF) was first.  Multi-core chips! in my cellphone! The challenges of converting Symbian to work in a multicore environment are numerous, and require lots of testing. Discussions of how to maintain compatibility for old code, shutting down and starting up CPUs on demand, and managing battery life. You can tell they have been planning this transition to multi-core for a long time. Basically, they said 2007 was the year they moved the kernel over to multicore, 2008 was a testing year, 2009 is optimization, and devices should be out in 2010. The Symbian technology people come across exactly as you would want them to–competent, understated, cautious, committed to maintaining their promises vis-a-vis compatibility for the Symbian 9 series.

(I did not get to attend the ARM and Texas Instrument presentations, but it was good to go by their booths and see their roadmaps for these SMP chips coming in the next year or two.)

"ScreenPlay" is Symbian's name for its new graphics and media framework

The brand new media and graphics framework was exciting as well. They brand it “Screenplay” (PDF) and they talked about separating the display into layers so you can have video running straight out of the processor’s DSP and overlay that with the window icons, buttons, frame that you need for the UI, running out of a different bit of memory and controlled by the CPU. So you are using the processor in the most efficient way.They talked about changing the way you code the UI–rather than a tree of hierarchical menus, they are moving to a scene graph where you define certain objects which exist in the UI in one branch, and then define the view in different branch graph. This is great because it will provide operators a lot of flexibility in how to style and brand their UIs for differentiation, while relying on the same underlying UI functions provided by Symbian.

Ironic tidbit: despite the fact that many mobile phones have a digital signal processor for handling video, it often goes unused. Most web video (ie Youtube) is running in browser-embedded Flash, which is doing software-based playback of the video–the worst possible scenario for processing power/battery life.

At the tail end of the graphics presentation they had a demo from a company called Scalado, which has some great tech for manipulating JPEG images quickly, without thumbnails. It is possible to quickly zoom, scale, and browse photos–just as fast as if you had real photo prints and were flipping through them with your hands. I had a Nokia N95 which I used extensively last year–a great multipurpose machine, but the 5 megapixel photos it took brought the Album feature to its knees. At the Scalado booth afterwards, I saw the same N95 running an Album application using Scalado’s tech just sailing through a huge album of 5 megapixel images. It is mighty impressive technology, faster than what you see on the iPhone/iPod (which use thumbnails) and Symbian announced that they are licensing parts of Scalado tech for their OS platform. I was very impressed by this and wish that more companies would license Scalado’s technology.

In contrast to the technical briefings, the main hall business speeches were unremarkable. In particular, the Japanese handset makers were particularly uninspiring. The gentleman from Sharp had a some pretty slides that covered the past and asked some obvious questions, but no direct answers and only vague hints of their roadmaps were forthcoming. It ended with an anticlimactic, and hollow statement:  “user interface is most important”. The gentleman from Sony-Ericsson was even worse–his slides were obviously a Symbian slide deck (in English) that he had put his name on and then read to the audience (in Japanese). He was obviously nervous, completely unprepared, and received a stony reception from an already bored audience. I had no sympathy for him on the feedback survey.

The elephant in the room was Apple’s 3G iPhone, which was released worldwide just 5 days before the summit. Almost every presentation alluded to, or referenced directly, Apple’s innovative interface and the resulting seemingly insatiable demand. The handset makers gave no hints that they have any sort of significant response planned. Sharp talked about the “touch screen” and the “UI-centric” development, but did not say outloud they cannot mimic Apple’s integration of software and hardware. Indeed, Sharp was touting their touch screens and “touch cruiser” sensor (think: a tiny notebook touchpad placed on the mobile just below the screen). The iPhone benefits from the tight integration of its software and hardware, a feat these Japanese handset makers will have a tough time duplicating.

Despite the lackluster business speeches, the importance of Symbian having an event here in Tokyo can not be underestimated. The real business occurs in exchanges of business cards at the exhibition center, and over dinners and cocktails, and not during a keynote speech. The event was packed, and the after-party was loud and energetic. While Apple’s iPhone is grabbing attention and headlines, and Google preps Android for release, the Symbian platform seems to be quietly responding and making changes it needs to make to stay out in front.