Symbian OS finally open!

It was one year ago when I dreamed of Symbian OS being open source....Indeed I felt a little satisfaction when some days ago Nokia announced the buy of the rest of Symbian Ltd shares and the creation of Symbian Foundation which will be the gatekeeper of the evolution of the next OPEN SOURCE generations of Symbian OS.
It is a huge turnkey into mobile business ecosystem and really really hard to say who will resist into next battle for consolidation that comes with the announce. In fact the new Symbian OS will include some middleware and application frameworks from S60, UIQ and MOAP. Easy to say that S60 will be strongly sponsored by Nokia.

Retrieving deleted sms from Nokia phone

During some research, I found an interesting "feature" on my Nokia mobile phone; I was able to retrieve any apparently deleted sms/mms....

Source: SecurityFocus



Davide Del Vecchio, an Italian security specialist, serendipitously discovered how to retrieve deleted text messages from Nokia NGage and Nokia 6600 simply using Nokia PCSuitebackup file and an hexadecimal editor.

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How to download Helix source files?

Bofore you start reading those lines I would let you know that my intention is not to provide a user guide. I would like to express my disappontment on Helix community's tools and if you reached this post googling in search of a solution probably you will agree with me and join the rant.

What is Helix? Briefly it is a suite of products offering multimedia features for several OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, Symbian). I said 'suite' because under the Helix label you can find a producer (to create multimedia contents), a player (to play them), a DNA client (the engine which runs below the player) and something more.... Sorry for the quick and dirt definitions but don't want to go out-of-scope. In case you discover Helix for the first time go to their site.

Those products are managed by the Community and are - for the most part - open source so anyone could join the Community to access source files and eventually give her contribution.

My experience with Helix started a year ago and it is limited to Symbian version so the following conclusions could not be applied to the whole Community.

The first source of information is of course the web site, which recently had a restilying that greatly improved navigation. But no way to download source files...they are managed through a repository to be accessed via ssh and cvs. The instructions are described but too often on the Helix mailing lists and forum the recurring question: "How to download sources?" is present. Once the connectivity problem is solved the next one is to get the files and choose the right ones? A bunch of Python scripts do the job but once again having the good setup is not straighforward....too many dependencies and environment variables to setup! How can I imagine that my web cam software could impact Helix scripts?

Ok..now that you have the right configuration to run the build script..run it and here the result:

To download the right files you have to configure the branch, the target and the profile you wish. Uhm....what are these? The first help is always the web, so come back to Helix site and surprisingly very poor descriptions (when available) on different profiles, target, branches. So you start guessing what will be the right one....really painfull experience.

What are the roots of these complexity?

Probably the intention to have a cross platform, multiple version source file management system. Really appreciable! But more complex the system is more need of information you need. Otherwise it is useless to build a community and to open sources if you do not improve partecipation.

Mailing list and forum are great means to share knowledge but I think that newbie questions facing above problems are too frequent, so the problem is elsewhere. It is in the official documentation: poor, hard to find, out-of-date.

Indeed adding fresh documents takes time and priorities often are on products delivery so I guess that Real Networks' (the owner of Helix ) engineers have little time to answer to newbies question and update documentation....so why do not exploit better the power of independent contributors?

Hey, have anybody in Real Networks never heard about Wiki? I'm not an expert on Wiki but have a look at what Nokia did with Forum Nokia Wiki. This is a quite recent iniziative but contents are growing so fast! And Nokia already had a really crowded forum to assist developers....but even this forum suffers of lack of official contributors and recurring questions.

I recently proposed Wiki adoption for my working team and even if advantages are not immediate, using it is the best way to discover it.

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Freescale chip in Nokia 5700 phone?

I have to agree with Michael Mace when he says that in blogosphere (and not only there) a buzz pinged back and forward became a news

Why? Because of this abstract:

...The 5700 runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and is based on a 369 MHz Freescale solution (same chip in the 6290). I can't find anything about the chip inside the 5070.Is the 5700 the cheapest S60 device to ever be released? Is this all thanks to Freescale's lower prices?...

Ring Nokia: Last day of CTIA: Nokia launches 5700 and 5070

Simon Judge reported the news even if he's wondering why no official announce has been issued.

Well, I don't know which CPU is shipped with Nokia 5700 but I doubt it's Freescale one.

I want to be extremely clear I work in Freescale but this is NOT an official announce. As far as I know, Freescale MXC single core architecture is not yet shipped within Nokia phones.

Eventually, it would be interesting to know which is the actual 'single chip' in N5700 and whether Ring Nokia have had the chance to have a look inside such phone during CTIA.

technorati tags:mace, freescale, nokia, ctia, mxc

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Carnival of the mobilist #66 at AllAboutSymbian

This week Carnival of the Mobilist is host by All About Symbian. Enjoy reading blog entries on every aspects of mobile world.

technorati tags:carnival, mobilist

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Open source Symbian OS ? New frontier or blasphemy

The fact that Symbian has an outstanding position in smatphone OS market isn't something new, as it is not new its strong relashionship with Nokia from economical as well as technical point of view. Nokia is the major shareholder of Symbian Co. therefore its predominant position makes less appealing the partecipation of others investors (that little by little reduce their shares) and the arrival of new ones.

Technically speaking, Symbian OS lack of important modules whose implementation is in licensees' scope, namely telephony application, DRM, IMS . This clue makes difficult the work for device manifactures who need to deal with two entities to adapt OS to hadware. In addition it's more difficult to foresee the evolution of the OS and undestand if it will support this technology or that one.

This is a fundamental point in the decision to adopt an OS. The decision influences not only the current platform but also the next ones, in a clear effort to avoid each time to approach a new software platform and its tools, and to reuse as much as possible by previous projects.

What could be the strategy to let Symbian be more appealing and less Nokia dependent? Be open....completely open! Enable single contributors and companies to experiment, to extend your operative system. Its difficult to address each request and even more difficult pick the right ones, but other players can create their niche on topics less interesting for the mainstream industry. Less interesting at present, but who knows what will be the mobile industry trend in 5-10 years? Why should I be a licensee to prototype on Symbian?

Being open source was a revolutionary concept some years ago, but now it's turning into a recognized business model, there is more than Linux...for istance, look at Funambol or Helix.

Even if this would lead to profileration of Symbian distributions, Symbian Co. will mantain a reference position and a reason to be as it is for Red Hat, Real Networks, Funambol...

Maybe someone has already evaluated this solution and even considered if Symbian's major shareholder would allow such disruptive policy in a market where it (Nokia) has a consolitated position!

Maybe someone has even evaluated that without an available reference hardware platform it's hard to prototype anything....Is there any manifacturer listening out there? As far as I know the only project based on open source hardware is OpenMoko. It's more than a geek project to produce a phone since they are near to ship the first phones this month...for developers, and in September for mass market. Of course it's a Linux based project, while FIC has created the hardware platform.

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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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