Should the Symbian design references be redesigned.When announced 5 years ago, the Symbian OS (EPOC release 6) was given 3 reference designs. Crystal was designed to be the replacement to the Psion Series 5, with a 640x200pixel landscape screen. Quartz was the answer to a stylus based Palm-esque PDA with a 208x300 pixel portrait screen, finally Pearl was the baby designed to add more functionality to existing phone designs with a 176x208 pixel screen.
Unlike offerings from Microsoft and Palm, both of whom's devices came with a single standard screen size meaning that whatever device a person owned the software would run the same, Symbian software could only run on one platform without some recoding and a recompile. As we've also discovered as time has marched on, subsequent revisions of the Symbian OS have resulted in "broken" software from the previous revisions. Though the saving graces here are Java and OPL both of which are fairly revision agnostic, although not platform agnostic.
Unfortunately despite users of the Psion series of devices hoping to see a device coming to replace their existing devices, Symbian managed to drop the ball. The first was that the first Symbian device to market was the Nokia 9210 communicator, which to a Series 5 owner seemed like a step backwards with the Series 3 styled keyboard and smaller screen size coupled with the lack of a stylus and the absence of the popular OPL. Despite these the device was very capable making it a great PDA in it's own right.
Sometime after the release of the 9210 the original reference designs were taken on by other companies as Symbian decided it wanted to concentrate on the underlying OS rather than the UIs on top. Nokia took on the Pearl and Crystal designs, naming it's versions Series 60 and Series 80 to fit in with it's existing UI naming strategys. The Quartz reference design was left on the shelf and so to keep it alive Symbian created the UIQ company and renamed the design UIQ.
The second device to market was the Nokia 7650 based on the Nokia's Series 60 showed another ball dropped, software released for this device wouldn't run on the 9210 and vice versa. Similarly when SonyEricsson released the P800 based on the UIQ.
At the time it seemed a bit daft and looking back ludicrous that software for the "lesser" devices was incompatible with the "better" ones, and the comparative lack of market penetration of Series 80 and UIQ devices meant that devices on these platforms lacked the volume of software available to Series 60 based devices. It's fairly obvious that both UIQ and Series80 devices are capable of running the glut of software released for Series60 simply by having the software mentioning to the OS which platform it was designed for and the OS adapting the screen draw accordingly. It may not be possible for a Series80 or UIQ piece of software to run on other platforms but they both could run Series 60.
This begs the question, Did no-one at Symbian guess that the Pearl platform would end up 3 times as popular as Quartz and Crystal combined? Or did they perhaps expect it but also expect the software coders to rewrite their software for each platform. Evidence suggests that Symbian were taking the modern modular OS thought forward and the suggestion was that applications would consist of 3 layers, the main engine of the software with no idea of UI or graphics, the graphical engine which would draw the relevant data displays though have no knowledge of the UI on which it ran, and the UI interface which would arrange the parts from the second layer to be suitable on the final device UI. This abstraction allows developers to keep the vast majority of their software the same while only changing one part to allow for easy portability.
Once the various UIs were taken on elsewhere Symbian had no control over them and the companies now owning them work on their own independant ideas. So as of the splitting of the UI between the various groups the onus comes onto these other companies to promote cross-compatability between the various Symbian platforms. Nokia as owners of both the Series 60 and 80 designs are in the unique position to create a compatability section to the Series 80 UI to detect a Series 60 application and adjust the way the screen displays accordingly (i.e. center the main screen in the large screen, softkeys to the right hand CBA area, and application title and icon on the left), in fact it's such a blindingly obvious idea to increase the amount of software titles available for Series 80 devices and thereby increase their perceived usefulness that it's a surprise they've not tried it already.
Also now Symbian have no control over UIs it's possible for every Symbian licensee to take the OS and create a brand new UI for each device further fragmenting what could have been a more unified platform. On the flipside though this more what device manufacturers would prefer as they can tailor the UI and graphical design of the OS around the design of the
device they are making rather than ending up in a "Windows CE" situation where everyones devices are pretty much identical in physical design giving more the impression that they are actually all the same. This creates the situation where units are branded on the UI they use rather than the Symbian OS, as declaring units as running Symbian OS would be a bit of a misnomer as although my 9500 is a Symbian OS device, so is my 3650 and there's no hope in hell of them really running the same software etc.
Symbian at the start put the ball in the court of the developer to create the software with easy porting in mind and to subsequently port between devices themselves. Unfortuantely as can be seen from the way things have turned out, some developers have kicked the ball around a bit and others have tripped over it, leaving us with a glut of software for one UI and a lack for others. As said before Nokia are in the best position to pick up the ball and modify Series 80 to be more compatible with Series 60 applications, this is more unlikely to occur with UIQ as it would probably end up with UIQ licensing aspects of the Series 60 UI from Nokia to create the compatability. Yet with the latest Series 60 offerings allowing for different screen sizes and the code required there to get various applications to render properly on the larger screens Nokia must have an idea of what could be done.
Essentially this would lead to applications running in a small window in the style of SuperGoBoy on the 9500 but would open up the devices to a world of applications and games from developers who either don't have the time of inclination to go through the effort of redesigning their graphics for the other sized devices. Lets face it the prime problem with porting is the presentation of the screen, something designed for Series 60 would leave a load of free space on the other platforms (though there's no reason why it can't use a smaller screen and have a background border image in the rest of the space, SFCave anyone?), similarly fitting something filling a Series 80 screen onto a smaller device needs some serious thought from the developer to make it happen. So perhaps the idea that developers would rewrite their UI interfaces for all the various platforms is a little too hopeful with hindsight, and the UI designers and Symbian should look at ways to help with the porting of applications with minimal or no effort, at least with a view of getting software from the devices with smaller screens to those with larger.