Which development platform for Symbian OS?

Red Five Labs have ported the .NET Compact Framework to Symbian OS.

What does it mean for....

• developers?

Additional troups of developers are enabled to play on mobile phonespowered by Symbian Os. Even those who are not confortable nor with C++,nor with C, nor with ActionScript, nor to Java, nor with Python, norwith Ruby. I don't care about which one is the best/the smartest/ the coolest, for a bit of fun check this picture :-).

It's true that alternative languages to native Symbian C++ APIs could reduce time for development if you don't need to exploit all the functionalities of the OS.

• end-users?

The most part of them is not aware which OS drives their mobile phone, nor which language has been used for their favourite game/rss reader/email reader....

What they care about is pay for the coolest phone with a lot of application already installed (just a few users buy software, most part are business men).

What they care is usability: if they do not like the interface of brand X, probably they won't buy a brand X phone again.

• Symbian OS?

Its position in smartphone market is outstanding and here in Europe is even stronger but there is still room for new players which are gaining market shares. So it needs to remain an attractive solution.

It must be attractive for device makers reducing the effort to make it run to different hardware platform: almost each phone has an ad-hoc design. We are far from using standard interfaces among components, despite an iniziative promoted by industry players.

It must be attractive for third parties who want to offer added services on mobile phones.

I think that offering another alternative to choose Symbian platform is reasonable, but something different is to give argument to prefer it. Arguments like development tools, debug tools, open source projects, community of developers to share knowledge/expertise, libraries to reuse as much as possible.

technorati tags:symbian, .net, programming

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