Bill Ray, over at El Reg, has penned a useful editorial on the problems facing Nokia and Sony Ericsson as new users pick up version 3 handsets and find that a large proportion of 'Series 60' and 'UIQ' software doesn't work. As ever, user education is the key here and both manufacturers and developers need to spell the third party software situation out for beginners, in my opinion.
Read on in the full article.
I think I just connected two dots for me personally.
The silence of the phone manufacturers regarding the binary break with Symbian 9 is indeed noteworthy, and the near-total silence of the potential and actual phone end users likewise - I at least did not read one bit so far from "normal" people buying OS 9 phones and then voicing protest about incompatibilities. (I saw several developers posting about the horrors of application signing and the purported death of Symbian freeware, but that's about it.)
So that's one dot. The other dot is the blog entry on "MobHappy" that was recently featured in the Carnival of the Mobilists #31:
Should We Just Give Up On Mobile Data and Content?
Guess what, sales of anything "advanced" on smartphones, like Symbian applications, are stagnant or even shrinking despite ever-increasing sales figures of the phones itself.
So why are there no users complaining and Nokia, SE et al able to pull through with a "hush, tell nobody about the binary break" policy?
Maybe because up to now there are so frustratingly few buyers and users of Symbian applications?...