Steve and Rafe have been thinking about the reach of S60 smartphones, wondering if many users need to know about S60 itself and justifying the low sales of many third party applications, before concluding that the platform itself is more for operator and manufacturer benefit.
Read on in the full article.
"The mobile world (despite the maturity of Symbian OS, S60, etc.) is still really in its infancy and much has yet to unfold."
Is true. And is also true, that I know people o use a 6600, like a normal analog old phone, even without the use of inside contacts (always take a paper to see the number) and they are very admired because mine it makes many things (and of them also, only that they are unaware of)!
There are lots of independent developers who would love to make money selling S60 apps and games, but they can't sell it directly to consumers because the consumers don't know the apps or games even exist.
Like them or hate them, the best people who can alter this situation are the phone network operators who can point their customers in the direction of apps and games for their phone, and let them buy them with a single click by allowing them to pay through their phone bill or prepaid credit. Of course they'd demand a cut of the price, but without their hand guiding the customers towards the product, the apps would remain upsold.
The phone networks also need developers because the way things are going the phone call business model isn't going to be around for much longer. They desperately have to reinvent themselves before network calls give way to (much cheaper) internet calls, and a good new identity would be as a software and content vendor.
The problem in the past has been the low quality of java software (and symbian software come to think of it), but if they are more discerning they can provide some really good apps and content. Even the dastardly Jamster/Jamba has been seen selling decent S60 apps such as Smartmovie and UltraMP3 lately.
Always the Network Operators... the selling point and the drive force of Hand Computers business.
With smartphones becoming ever more powerful, they also become harder to handle for hobbyist developers, not to mention the segmentation of the market between various OS versions, screen resolutions and everything that makes one model unique and different from the crowd.
As a result, good applications (as in "cleverly designed, optimized to run on your specific phone model, actively maintained"😉 become rare stuff, and since the builtin capabilities indeed will be more than enough for many users, getting a return on investment is also becoming harder for developers.
The continuous decrease in product lifecycle (with new models being released avery other month, and a new OS version every six months or so) makes it very difficult for developers to follow-up their own products, and even dedicated ones may have troubles staying in tune with the market. And if manufacturers are wise enough to stay with the same OS for a while (look at Palm with the Treo 650 still running PalmOS 5.x), it's considered out-of-date by end-users always looking for novelty... 😞
Add to this inadequate sale chanels which don't reach most end users, and very often greedy developers (who wants to pay $20 for another tetris clone?), and we all know the result.
One thing I've always wondered about is: why did Symbian drop OPL support? Back when I was using a Psion 3a, I knew by reading the manual that I could easily write simple applications to perform tasks I needed frequently. This very simple thing was IMHO the best way to let people know that their device can be customized, improved do do whatever they want it to, leading them naturally to look for other applications made by talented developers that might better meet their needs than what they could code themselves in OPL.
Now you don't have OPL built-in on S60 devices, and even though it's open source, by the time it gets ported to S60 3rd edition (for instance), if it ever happens, most people will purchase S60 6th or 7th edition and won't know (or care) about OPL. Too bad...
The lack of onboard development tool (and the paucity of desktop-based development solutions) is probably the main gripe I have with my brand new Nokia E61. I was so despereate that I even shelled out big money to purchase MobiForms, only to discover that the E61 (as other S60 3rd edition devices) wasn't supported despite the description over on SymbianGear, by chance MobiForm developer is both friendly, supportive and honnest so I got my money back but was very frustrated nonetheless!
Yes, OPL was part of the *genius* of the Psion palmtop back in the 1990s, allowing everyone to create Hello world in under a minute and more experienced programmers to create commercial apps using nothing more than the device itself.
The dropping of OPL by Nokia when they created the 9210 ranks as one of the saddest decisions in the Symbian world - ever. Even today, despite pledges of Symbian/Nokia support, I think OPL remains a product that's now maintained by one (busy) man in his spare time. Great, great shame.
Steve
"I think OPL remains a product that's now maintained by one (busy) man in his spare time."
Who is the hero? You?
All people talks about Psion Computers like a good souvenir. I had tested a 5Mx (I think is the assignment) once, in 1998 or 99. My stronger memory is of the keyboard. That good that it was. None after it has so confortable keyboard (9210, 9500, 9300) or even E61, E70.
I think the OPL hero at the moment that slitchfield refers to is Arjen Broeze (his OPL site is here.)
I like OPL myself, and I don't understand why Nokia did not include it in the 9210, but frankly: We are speaking here about people that do not know that their phone is a smartphone. About people who have all or nearly all their needs satisfied by the built-in applications of their phone. About people too lazy to learn something, anything new about their phone.
And you think such people would program OPL on their phones? In sufficient numbers to make a difference somehow in the crisis for application developers that we talk about here, e.g. by educating them about the possibilities of their phones? I would like to believe this, being a developer myself, but I can't.
rbrunner wrote:I think the OPL hero at the moment that slitchfield refers to is Arjen Broeze (his OPL site is here.)I like OPL myself, and I don't understand why Nokia did not include it in the 9210, but frankly: We are speaking here about people that do not know that their phone is a smartphone. About people who have all or nearly all their needs satisfied by the built-in applications of their phone. About people too lazy to learn something, anything new about their phone.
And you think such people would program OPL on their phones? In sufficient numbers to make a difference somehow in the crisis for application developers that we talk about here, e.g. by educating them about the possibilities of their phones? I would like to believe this, being a developer myself, but I can't.
Thanks for clarification! But, probably You are right!
many symbian devices are in the hands of people who don't have/want credit cards. myself i don't have one yet have used symbian devices since they came out and was a psion user since the series 3a. i cannot walk into a shop and buy an app for the symbian. i could get a throw away credit card using www.3v.ie but i am reluctant to give my phone number and details to an organisation which may sell on my data (i've had a lot of problems with sms spam).
it would be very nice if the phone companies like vodafone with their markets for downloadable games added symbian apps to this market as then i could buy them.
my first purchase would be a text editor for symbian. at the moment i'm trying to find out if the nokia e61 includes one by default here in ireland.
moylan wrote:many symbian devices are in the hands of people who don't have/want credit cards. myself i don't have one yet have used symbian devices since they came out and was a psion user since the series 3a. i cannot walk into a shop and buy an app for the symbian. i could get a throw away credit card using www.3v.ie but i am reluctant to give my phone number and details to an organisation which may sell on my data (i've had a lot of problems with sms spam).it would be very nice if the phone companies like vodafone with their markets for downloadable games added symbian apps to this market as then i could buy them.
my first purchase would be a text editor for symbian. at the moment i'm trying to find out if the nokia e61 includes one by default here in ireland.
E61 have one office suite inside!
Hi,
Interesting comments from both you guys.
I recall quite a few years ago, in the nineties, whereby someone said that the greatest killer app of all time is the "pencil and paper" because it is totally irreplaceable for what it does. For any technology to be called a killer app, it has to approach the usability of the pencil/paper combo.
Form follows function or is it function following form?
The S60 phones except for the E61 are marketed as MultiMedia phones. Since that is the chosen segment, its form virtually dictates that the main use of the device is for multimedia purposes. Its form negates even traditional mini-geek uses for devices e.g. spreadsheet, database, minor text entry on the go hence any need for extensive software development. More to the point - serious and potentially profitable software development will really be limited to picture and sound manipulation i.e. an extremely narrow category of software.
Web and emailing on S60 phones IMHO is strictly for masochists. It's tiresome to even enter to the URL, so as a user you are limited to probably a few frequently used sites and that it - forget about even googling with that input interface.
Entering appointments and reminders? - well it is an massive inconvenience. It's 3 step backwards.
Yes, if push comes to shove, the S60 is a computer - but IMHO extreme geekness is required to use if as such - does not even cover 1% of the S60 buyers.
Rafe: "not educating people that this is possible, it is changing their thinking that this is the way it should be" - no Rafe I disagree - if it is obviously the correct way, no education will be needed ex. being contactable anywhere by mobile phone did not need to be taught, it was so obviously advantageous. IMHO.
Steve: Mobimate's 500,000 sales - well, I suspect more than 90% will be from Palm, MSoft and Blackberry users i.e. the real business power users, with the bulk of the remainder being N80/UIQ sales. You really have to be a masochist to do your travel expense or travel scheduling on the S60.
You know I feel ripped off with the whole Symbian saga so far. The mobile internet is really not here yet from what was promised in the first Symbian meeting in London (1999?), when the 5mx was launched.
Lets be honest - we loved our Psions. Our thinking was that it was superior to the Palm as a handheld computer because you could do almost everything a laptop computer could do MORE easily because of the keyboard. Palm users will try to prove that it is possible to write Grafitti faster than we could type (possible for 2 lines, but lets try a few hundred words). The only thing that was missing was the instant web surfing part to be a real anywhere computing powerhouse (oh Conan where art thee?). But all this time Palm was kicking Psion's pants in the global sales.
Then, yaay! Symbian is formed - EPOC will rule the world. And what do we get? A "smart?"phone that requires multi-tapping for data input. Its like a real regression.
IMHO Nokia especially is not interested in the applications market - if they were, more effort would have been placed on Series 80, as the S80 format is more suitable for wide applications usage. Nokia is in the business of:
(1) selling handsets
(2) selling telecommunications equipment
Heres the catch-22 position they are facing. Unless they can get the the utilisation of real mobile date i.e. non-SMS and hopefully 3G, they are not going to get the telcos to invest in equipment towards 3.5G and 4G!
Now unless something exciting happens in 3G, no one needs to pay the premium for a S60 phone - after all as I have always maintained, a SonyE K750 is a better camera phone than any S60 phone and is definitely better value considering that the "capabilities" of the s60 cannot be easily utilised and the S60 apps market is not inspiring.
As an ex-fund manager looking at the crystal ball, Nokia is in big trouble because the S60 is now high margin high volume segment, that will very quickly disappear as there are no advantages for owning it.
Telcos have not even begun to recoup the cost of 3G acquisition (let alone implementation) and don't have a clue what to do next. Look at the huge investment write-offs by Vodafone.
Free virtually anywhere WiFi is available in a lot of places. Here in Kuala Lumpur most of the N9500 users that I know clock up probably less than an hour a month on GPRS because of free WiFi at the shopping centres. In fact they clock up more Fax data time than GPRS!
The S60 is designed for the telco to make money via MMS. It was not designed for us users to use it as a real smartphone in its original definition (incarnation). <sigh>
That in itself leads to the overall proliferation, short product cycles of hardware & software interfaces, slight OS variations etc. designed to hopefully make the user create that video/picture to send that telco pleasing income generating MMS. All this makes it very difficult for software developers.
Euroclie mentioned that perhaps Symbian follow Palm's ex. of maintaining an old OS for the sake of stability. I don't think it is the underlying OS that is the problem, but the proliferation of interfaces that is the problem. Most software does not require the enhanced "improved" capabilities that Symbian apparently does. Thats was supposedly the whole point of using Symbian because it can be divided into modules so that communications module does not affect say interface modules, except in this case Nokia went crazy with the interface module.
Nokia IMHO is still experimenting with the hardware & software interfaces. Pre-symbian days, virtually no matter what Nokia you bought, you knew what each drill-down meant. Not any more.
According to business experts that was the secret of Nokia's success compared to Ericsson's and Motorola's inconsistent interface. I think it will still hold true for the future, except that if Nokia does not get its act together, it will go down to SonyE and Motorola.
Most applications do not require the enhanced capabilities of the new versions of Symbian. All those enhancements are for the telco benefits.
Well at present there are two real losers - the telcos (so what) and the ex-Psion users (tongue in cheek) as we have nothing!
The S80 is slow, poorly and under developed (I mean a Revo is more legible than any S80 - why can't they even bother to get the zoom levels correct?) because the market for it is not big by S60 standards and it is trounced by the Treo, BlackBerry and MSoft offerings in terms of sales numbers.
So is there light at the end of the tunnel? Possibly:
(i) S80 I think is dead - the form factor is was wrong hence Palm trounced Psion.
(ii) UIQ P990 thrives among non-corporate type power users (hey! free wifi at Starbucks) i.e. no need to do much collaboration so more for the stand alone user. Plus it has the definite 3G killer - WI-FI.
(iii) We will see more E61 type phones in the future - other than MMS for 3G usage, you need a thumb board to have the mobile internet to be successful so that more 3G use is encouraged
(iv) M600i (wish it had a camera) may lead to something exciting - plus it makes mobile internet relatively easier.
Maybe then, software development will come along.
Just my two pennies.
rbrunner wrote:I think the OPL hero at the moment that slitchfield refers to is Arjen Broeze (his OPL site is here.)I like OPL myself, and I don't understand why Nokia did not include it in the 9210, but frankly: We are speaking here about people that do not know that their phone is a smartphone. About people who have all or nearly all their needs satisfied by the built-in applications of their phone. About people too lazy to learn something, anything new about their phone.
And you think such people would program OPL on their phones? In sufficient numbers to make a difference somehow in the crisis for application developers that we talk about here, e.g. by educating them about the possibilities of their phones? I would like to believe this, being a developer myself, but I can't.
No, I meant Rick Andrews, the guy who's been behind OPL since 1993.... Arjen's great though, a very active developer. Rick's the guy who *writes* OPL, as in writes the interpreter.
I only spoke up for OPL here in these comments as a *tangent* to the main points in the article. No, there's no way most of the current S60 userbase could write in OPL and create custom apps, I quite agree. Nor should they. But the presence of something as simple and as on-device as OPL draws in a vital *extra* percent or so of home programming enthusiasts, who then create a mass of custom and specialist apps.
Mind you, this is all pie in the sky, as Nokia and Symbian seem determined not to invest time in OPL and there's also now a signing issue for each app created.... Sigh.
Steve Litchfield
Part of the problem here is you have to step back and look from outside your own perspective. sovind - you are clearly a power user, and dearly loved your Psion, but that was a tiny market relative to the 100 million smartphone market. While you (and most people here) would like to see this extra stuff and see a lot of problems the majority of users would not. However disconcerting it may be S60 (unlike Palm, Windows Mobile) is going after the mass market and as a result sacrafices are being made... That said I think there are some devices coming up that you'll really like.
Yes Nokia is about selling handsets, but to sell those it needs to make them attractive. Thirdy party software is a killer feature. However Nokia do need to wake up a bit more to do this.
Yes I agree with you about the marketing as multimedia phones. However increasingly we are seeing better device segmentation (N91, E61, 5500, 325). Multimedia is still key and the segmentation is concentrated on this currently (it is the most popular), but this will change.
The 500,000 mobimate sales was Symbian only I believe. Mobimate is about information retrieval and takes advantage of OTA and anywhere. That's why it has done well.
S60 is not just a high margin market. Nokia will use it in more and more phone because that is what operators want to see. Devices like the E50 / Nokia 5500 are examples of this. Previously they woudl have been propietary OS, but they are not now.
The 3.5 G investment (HSDPA) is alreayd taking place. The first networks are going live now. WiFi will not cover everywhere ever. Central urban areas yes, elsewhere no...
The fragmentation of Symbian OS is greatly over exagerated. Within platforms it is fairly stable. Thign things is the number are such that Symbian 8 devices are more numerous that any competing platform on their own. The same will be true of Symbian 9 - there are alreayd 1 million 3250's sold. That's not far of the annual Treo sales with just one device in four months (and yes that a grossly unfair device comparison..!). Symbian 9 is partly aimed at addressing this issue too. The other platforms are going to have to do it too, Symbian's big advantage is they will have done it first.
rbrunner wrote:We are speaking here about people that do not know that their phone is a smartphone.
<...snip...>
And you think such people would program OPL on their phones?
But at last, by simply having a look at the various icons in the launcher they might have a better chance to understand that their phone is "smart".
They might realise that even if they lack the skill/time, anyone can write applications to expand the phone's capabilities and that if simple programs can be written by hobbyist, then 1st class applications are certainly available from professional programmers.
This in turn could only mean good things for application developers, right?
Hi sovind,
Very interesting post, I'll only answer to a few bits of it, 'cause I'm too verbose already as is... plus I do agree with most of your post! 😃
Web and emailing on S60 phones IMHO is strictly for masochists. It's tiresome to even enter to the URL, so as a user you are limited to probably a few frequently used sites and that it - forget about even googling with that input interface.100% agree with you. That's why I went for the E61, to have a decent input method.
Now unless something exciting happens in 3G, no one needs to pay the premium for a S60 phone - after all as I have always maintained, a SonyE K750 is a better camera phone than any S60 phone and is definitely better value considering that the "capabilities" of the s60 cannot be easily utilised and the S60 apps market is not inspiring.Agreed. I use to find Nokia's interface better than the rest of the crowd (6100 vs Motorola Timeport 7089 for instance), but right now if I was just going to use the builtin stuff, then I'd go for a SE phone, certainly.
Free virtually anywhere WiFi is available in a lot of places.No, this is far from the truth in most places. I travel a lot (used to be all around the world, now it's only all over Europe), and finding free WiFi hotspots when you're a traveler is definitely tricky, even in the US. Granted, if you're a "local" then you can certainly, given enough time, find the right places, but when you're on a schedule, the chances to find a free WiFi spot are still slim. Hell, connecting to non-free ones isn't necessarily trivial, too, because most of the time your mobile browser (be it on a Palm, PPC, Symbian or Linux device) is not compatible enough for you to login properly! 😞
And even in France, where I do live (in Paris, mind you, not in a small village lost in the middle of nowhere, so the situation shouldn't be that bad), the almost ubiquitous GSM/GPRS coverage (or the more restricted yet already widespread 3G coverage) makes it a far better solution to connect - far better than having to pay for the few WiFi hotspot you can find. Frankly, I chose the E61 because it has WiFi (and the keyboard), because I know that at home at least I can connect for free using my own ADSL access and WiFi access point. But most people actually do not even know what they could do with WiFi, and wouldn't use it if their smartphone had it.
WiFi is a geek's stuff, right now, not mass market, and people looking for a mobile phone aren't even going to notice that they could (at least when the technology is stable and widespread) save on their phone bill using WiFi.
The S60 is designed for the telco to make money via MMS. It was not designed for us users to use it as a real smartphone in its original definition (incarnation). <sigh>Sad but true... if only I could get rid of everything MMS-related! I never receive MMS, and (especially on a cameraless phone like the E61) never send MMS. <sigh>
Euroclie mentioned that perhaps Symbian follow Palm's ex. of maintaining an old OS for the sake of stability. I don't think it is the underlying OS that is the problem, but the proliferation of interfaces that is the problem.Well, both the interface and the OS are tied to the problem. Coming from the Zaurus world, I did realize that while it's "good" (in a philosophical sense) to have the choice between multiple interfaces, the constant "battles" to know which interface is the best is simply counterproductive for everyone. End users, after settling for a given OS (Linux in this case) had to chose between Qtopia and X-based ROMs, and of course applications supporting one would not work with the other, as most developers simply didn't have the resources to support both interfaces.
Now what do we have with Symbian? The very same S60 vs. UIQ "battle", where the developers loose because they have to chose one platform or suffer trying to catchup with two flows of OS/interface update, two breeds of devices. The End Users suffers as well because if he ever cares to get addon programs, he'll have to dig between the different interfaces and OS versions to find if his current phone is supported... Someone trying to install an application and getting a "phone not supported" error message is not likely to try again anytime soon, if the application isn't a "killer application". And he won't care whether it's the OS version or the interface that's the problem, he'll just complain that it's not working as expected, and give up.
(ii) UIQ P990 thrives among non-corporate type power users (hey! free wifi at Starbucks) i.e. no need to do much collaboration so more for the stand alone user. Plus it has the definite 3G killer - WI-FI.Yeah, I think that there will be "smart" phones with a Blackberry/Treo/P9xx form factor, and all the bells and whistles, and otherwise "not too smart" (even if running almost the same OS) phones for multimedia-style people, because as you mentionned, using a numeric keyboard to enter something else than SMS or phone numbers is counterproductive and will get people bored before they even realise the full potential of their device...
(iii) We will see more E61 type phones in the future - other than MMS for 3G usage, you need a thumb board to have the mobile internet to be successful so that more 3G use is encouraged