The source code for the ten-year old Symbian platform will be completely open source and available for free starting Thursday. The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history, claims the Symbian Foundation.
“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”
Symbian, which powers most of Nokia’s phones, has been shipped in more than 330 million devices worldwide. But in the last few years, Symbian has seen more than its fair share of changes. In 2008, Nokia, one of Symbian’s largest customers, acquired a major share in the company. Nokia then created the Symbian Foundation to distribute the platform as an open source project, and began the process of opening up the source code that year.
Meanwhile, the operating system has seen new rivals crop up. Google’s Android, which is based on a Linux kernel, has become a favorite among handset makers such as Motorola and HTC. And it’s based on an open source foundation too.
Symbian’s move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet.
Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Williams.
“About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”
Symbian is also ahead of Android in that it will publish its platform roadmap and planned features up to 2011, he says. And anyone can influence that roadmap or contribute to new features.
“Open source is also about open governance,” says Williams. “It’s about letting someone other than one control point guide the feature set and the asset base.”
But will that be enough for Symbian to steal away customers lured by a snazzier and younger rival?
Tired of waiting for the Xperia X10 for your first taste of Android and Sony Ericsson? Leave it to the gang at the XDA-developers forum to jump the gun. Last week marked the successful port of Android 2.0.1 (or Android 1.6, if you so choose) to the Xperia X1. No bluetooth, camera, or GPS — not yet, at any rate — but WiFI, GSM, resistive touchscreen, and all the other amenities should be functioning. Tweakers at heart can find all the necessary files and instructions via the source link, and as for the rest of us, there’s a video to live vicariously through after the break.
The silly little sensor in the latest-gen iPod nano might have you thinking that high-quality video recording isn’t anywhere on Apple’s radar, but if you look in the smartphone space, HD video is shaping up to be the next gotta-have-it feature among the world’s most buzzworthy handsets — and sure enough, we’re getting some hints here that it’ll be on board the next iPhone. Remember that mysterious “N89” device in the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK? We’ve been tipped off that a gander at the MediaValidator.plist file reveals a few telling stats: the maximum video width is up from 768 pixels to 1280, and the maximum number of pixels per frame is up to 921,600, which just happens to work out to 1280 x 720. The device’s AVC profile has been bumped from 3.0 to 3.1, too, which adds in support for 720p — so yeah, all the signs are there, and industry trends pretty much require that we expect it at this point.
On a related note, DigiTimes notes that ASUS spin-off Pegatron has allegedly been picked up as an OEM for the N89 (or whatever the new iPhone’s internal code happens to be) — but it won’t be alone. The indication seems to be that Foxconn will continue churning out phones for Cupertino, too, perhaps a sign that these guys are expecting the need for more capacity than the old OEM alone can deliver, or that there could be multiple generations in the retail channel (a la 3G / 3GS) at the same time. Given Apple’s typical iPhone cycle, it could be a few months before we know for certain — so go ahead and take your sweet time speculating on this round.
Microsoft’s Best Buy-exclusive Arc Keyboard still won’t be hitting stores for another couple of weeks (February 21st, to be specific), but we were lucky enough to get our hands on one a little early, and figured we’d share a few impressions with you, the keyboard-using masses. The first thing you’ll notice when seeing the keyboard in person is that it’s smaller than even the press photos suggested — basically the same size as your average 15-inch laptop keyboard, with a glossy bezel just big enough to let you pick it up without pressing a key. It’s also undeniably eye-catching, with an “arc” that actually more closely resembles Apple’s Magic Mouse than Microsoft’s own Arc mouse.
Of course, most folks will choose function over form when it comes to a keyboard, and in that respect the Arc Keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag.
In a battle against the iPad, Amazon is not likely to go down without a fight. The first sign? The online retailer has reportedly purchased touch-screen company Touchco, according to the New York Times.
Touchco’s technology and staff will join Amazon’s Kindle harware division, Lab 126, the paper said. Touchco has about half a dozen employees and has not yet produced a product. A note on its Web site currently says: “Thank you for your interest in Touchco. As of January 2010, the company is no longer doing business.”
The Times said Touchco has a touch-based technology that is cheaper to produce than those found in Apple’s products, and is also sensitive to different levels of pressure.
After the debut of the iPad last month, Amazon said that its “customers can read and sync their Kindle books on iPhones, iPod touches, PCs, and soon Blackberrys, Macs, and iPads. Kindle is purpose-built for reading. “
Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
Ker-BOOM. That’s the thundering explosion of Amazon purchasing Touchco, a little company that makes incredibly cheap, infinitely multitouchable displays, and merging it into their Kindle division. Kindle Touch. It actually sounds kind of nice.
Touchco’s touchscreen tech is designed to be cheap—under $10 a square foot—using a resistive display tech called interpolating force-sensitive resistance. What makes it more special is that unlike most resistive touchscreens, it’s pressure sensitive, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. Plus, it’s totally transparent (old school resistive touchscreen layers dim brightness and dull colors) and designed to work with full color LCD screens. (Bits has more on Touchco.)
You know, the kind of gorgeous screen that’s perfect for magazines, textbooks, and interactive content. The stuff that E-Ink Kindles can’t do right now, but that a certain other reader announced last week can. So! A full color Kindle Touch. Just think about it.
In what we’re hoping bodes well for future Kindle iterations, Amazon‘s pulled out its credit card and picked up New York-based startup Touchco, who specializes in — you guessed it — touchscreen technology. The company will be merged with Lab126, a.k.a. the Kindle hardware division. Here’s why we’re excited: the startup claims its interpolating force-sensitive resistance tech can be made completely transparent, works with color LCDs, and can detect “an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points” as well as distinguish between a finger and stylus. Current cost estimates put it at less than $10 per square foot, which The New York Times says is “considerably” less expensive than the iPad / iPhone screens. We’re not expecting to see immediate results with this acquisition, but given the proliferation of touch in the latest batch of e-book readers, it’d be foolish of Amazon not to join in on the fun. Ready for the Kindle 3 rumor mill to start up again?
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the National Intelligence Committee that the United States is at risk of a “crippling” cyber-attack, and without the proper tools to defend against such an attack. Blair counseled the US to “deal with that reality,” saying that catastrophic consequences would result if it did not deal with said reality. Specific problem areas he cited include the fact that more and more, foreign companies supply both the hardware and software for private businesses. Blair also noted the fact that the net has served as a breeding ground for “homegrown radicalism.” You don’t say? Hit the source link a fuller detail of yesterday’s proceedings.
Google’s been doing some pretty slick stuff with QR codes lately, and now it looks like The Weather Channel’s getting in on the fun — it’s running a little on-screen graphic prompting Android owners to download their app by scanning their TV screens. Sure, it’s not the craziest thing in the world — it just takes you to the Android market listing — but it’s certainly fun, and one of the more mainstream uses of QR codes we’ve seen in a while. Check the video after the break.
Update: We originally said it takes you to the webpage; in actuality, it takes you to the the Android market. (Thanks, Caleb!)
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Touchco’s touchscreen tech is designed to be cheap—under $10 a square foot—using a resistive display tech called interpolating force-sensitive resistance. What makes it more special is that unlike 
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the National Intelligence Committee that the United States is at risk of a “crippling” 
