Just a quick question which mostly relates to games, do you feel you are getting good value for your money when you fork out for an app for your symbian OS device? I ask because some years ago equivalent apps to what are being released now would have been thrown out freely to users of the Psion devices and similarly source code could be available for people to tweak apps to their own designs.
Part of what puts me up to this is a recent thread in the 9500 forums on how poor Smartmovie plays back videos. In a vaguely contentious debate some put down the lack of quality to it being a poor device and OS and others the fact that not enough effort had been put into the software. This argument took me back a few years and reminded me of a similar situation not too long after the 9210 was released.
On the 16th of August 2001, Pigmy Projects (a demo group active on the Amiga scene) released the first and only demo on the 9210 communicator. Entitled G-force 2001 and available here for those who still have a 9210 knocking around to use it on, it pushed back the boundaries of what we thought possible at the time on such a device, as well as traditional effects such as bump mapping they showed off fullscreen 3d animation with Goraud shading. What can the 9210 do? It can rock and rock hard. Proof that a device such as the 9210 had people waiting in anticipation of what could be done next, and more importantly what games would employ such good graphics. And what happened, nothing came. No more demos were released and no games group released anything near the quality achieved by a demo group chucking some code out for free.
Now time runs on, the 9500 is here a device with 3 times the processor power and a mile more memory, will we see any demos arrive, anything to show of what can be achieved on this modern device. Probably not, which is a shame, in the days of the Amiga and Atari 16bit computers the demo coders would shame games programmers by what they could achieve which did result in cases with more work and effort being put into applications to show that they wouldn't be shown up by demo coders (and if they couldn't beat them, then hire them).
Smartphones and PDAs are tight devices, there's no room for the leniency that is seen so much with windoze applications where there are miles more resources than required so why spend time optimizing to make it work on a slightly older machine. On these portable devices the code needs optimizing to make every cycle count, get the last bit of speed from the device. The 9210 spec was far superior to the 16 bit Atari and Amiga computers of the early 90s, yet the applications didn't show that off, they never really competed with the quality of 15 year old 16bit machine. Heres hoping the coders get off their buts and try to catch up, the faster and modern devices shouldn't just be pushing out cheap 2d platformers, the N-gage shouldn't be the only 3d games device, the others are capable with effort.
As I alluded to earlier smartmovie for the 9500 seems to perform very badly, which doesn't seem right for the spec compared to the same app on other devices, and the improvements like this needs will only come when companies are shown up and need to put the extra effort in to make a simple app into a great app. Here's hoping the improvements come off of the programmer's own backs rather than waiting for another group to say, "we can make a better performing media player than that." The same goes to any companies who may think they can just put out the bear minimum of an application then take peoples money for it because there's no competition to force them to improve.
Are we getting value for money apps? Those that don't have a 9210 can watch G-Force 2001 by Pigmy Productions by clicking this link and downloading the .mpg for a taster of what could be done 3 years ago, on an underpowered device. Then think about what could be done now.