Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve already known that Adobe would be bringing Flash Player 10.1 to Windows Phone 7, but the company has just now made that fully official at its currently-happening MAX conference (alongside its Air 2.5 announcement), and it’s also confirmed exactly which other mobile platforms the plug-in will be headed to. That includes WebOS 2.0, which we’ve already seen first hand, along with BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo and, last but not least, the LiMo platform — those will all of course join Android 2.2, which already supports the plug-in. Unfortunately, there’s still no timeline for a release on each platform, with Adobe only saying that Flash 10.1 is “expected” to hit each mobile OS. Head on past the break for the relevant snippet from Adobe’s press release.

Continue reading Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more

Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Quick, name the most popular smartphone operating system in the world: It isn’t Android, iPhone or the BlackBerry OS. Say hello to Symbian, an open source mobile OS that’s nearly a decade old. More than 300 million devices worldwide run Symbian. Some 41 percent of smartphones have Symbian on them.

Despite its popularity, Symbian is broken. The operating system’s user interface lacks the snazziness of its rivals, its touchscreen capabilities feel grafted on. It is slow, and developing apps for Symbian is hard.

With younger, prettier competitors in the market, Symbian seems like an aging actress that should have already stepped out of the spotlight.

Symbian also seems to be losing corporate support. Earlier this week, Lee Williams, CEO of the Symbian Foundation resigned for “personal reasons.” Williams, an enthusiastic champion of Symbian and a vocal critic of Google’s Android OS, often did media rounds touting Symbian.

Williams’ exit came on the heels of handset makers Sony Ericsson and Samsung declaring they will no longer manufacture devices running the operating system. With their departures, the only companies left on board with Symbian are Sharp and ZTE (not exactly handset trendsetters), plus Nokia, the one company that truly relies on the OS and with which its fortunes are intricately connected.

Sure, it’s the dominant OS worldwide, but with the rise of smartphones, Symbian hardly seems positioned for the future.

So can Symbian be fixed? Yes, say developers and analysts.

“It’s too early to abandon Symbian,” Nick Jones, an analyst with Gartner Research wrote on his blog last month. “It’s sick, but it’s far from dead; it’s still out-shipping other mobile OSes by a huge margin.”

Freddie Gjertsen, head of product development for Touchnote, an app that is available across Android, iPhone and Symbian, agrees.

“It’s an OS that has had 12 years of continuous development, many thousand of hours of bug testing and fixing. There’s a stability and robustness there that should count for something,” he says. “If Nokia focuses on it, I don’t see why Symbian can’t be fixed.”

Nokia executives says despite the discontent around Symbian, they aren’t willing to give up on the OS. Symbian could put smartphones within the reach of millions of users who can’t pay more than $100 for an unsubsidized device, they say.

To get there, though, Nokia will have to fix four major things: Symbian’s user interface, developer support, app-development environment and the leadership vacuum for the platform.

“How difficult is to fix Symbian? Not so much,” says Rich Green, CTO of Nokia. “You will see some major changes in the forthcoming release of Symbian.”

One of those changes will be to release a version of the OS more often than Symbian’s current schedule of about every 18 months. “That will improve the usability of the OS and keep up with the trend,” says Green.

As for developers, they have the siren call of a global market that can be difficult to resist.

“We can give developers the whole world,” he says. “When you think about the reach Nokia has with Symbian, that is untouched by any other vendor.”

Getting a better UI

Remember older smartphones such as HTC’s Sidekick? They had resistive touchscreens and confusing menus that were difficult to use. The iPhone raised the bar for both hardware and user experience. It ushered in an interface that was clean, driven by icons rather than text-based menus and easy to navigate.

In 2008, when Google launched Android on the HTC G1, it offered a similar experience. Since then, even Microsoft has reinvented its mobile OS to have a UI with some pizzazz.

Not so with Symbian.

“There’s only one problem with Symbian and that is the user interface,” says Jan Ole Suhr, a Berlin, Germany, app developer who has worked on the Symbian platform since 2003.

“From a technical point of view, it is still the best OS: It consumes very little power, is robust and has been there since 2002 running on millions of phones,” he says. But, yes, the UI is really lacking.”

Suhr says it won’t take much to fix the UI but is puzzled that Nokia hasn’t done it so far.

“A change to the UI is not so hard,” he says. “The UI is just the presentation layer of the OS. An OS is far more complex. With a little effort, they can turn around the Symbian ship in no time.”

Nokia executives defend the company’s efforts. Symbian^3 tries to bring a fresh look to the mobile phone UI and future versions of the UI will be better, says Kai Öistämö.

“Android and iOS could start from a blank sheet of paper,” says Öistämö. “But Symbian has to carry the past so it has unfortunately created a bit of slowness in the UI experience.”

Another way to to help developers create better looking apps for the OS is to adopt Qt, an app and UI framework that can work across platforms, says Nokia. Nokia announced Thursday that it’s putting its energies into Qt as the sole app-development platform.

Things are turning upside down in Espoo today. Besides, earnings and reported job cuts of some 1,800 employees, Nokia also announced that it’ll be streamlining its development strategy to unify environments for Symbian and MeeGo. Nokia’s new approach calls for the adoption of Qt, and only Qt, as its application development framework from today onward. Here’s what that means for new N8 owners:

You can buy a Nokia smartphone confident that any improvements introduced later to the Symbian platform, such as the user interface, can be made available to download on your device as well. No need to wait for Symbian^4 – the improvements we were planning for Symbian^4 will be introduced as and when they become available. In fact, we will no longer be talking about Symbian^3 or Symbian^4 at all – it will be one constantly evolving and constantly improving platform.

Sounds like a smart move to us. After all, it’s Symbian’s UI, and not the OS, that we have the most trouble with — an issue that Nokia readily concedes. So the faster they can improve it — even pieces of it in a continuous evolution of the experience — the better. Nokia also announced support for HTML5 web content and applications for the Symbian and MeeGo platforms in both Qt and the browser. Click through for the press release and to hear Rich Green, Nokia CTO, discuss the new strategy.

Continue reading Nokia ends talk of Symbian^4, adopts HTML5 in Qt framework

Nokia ends talk of Symbian^4, adopts HTML5 in Qt framework originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 06:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feeling that Constellation Quest, but think it’d look a little better in brilliant yellow? Break open that piggy bank. Oh, and while you’re at it, break open several dozen more piggy banks… and maybe even a real bank or two. We’re hearing that the world’s Vertu boutiques will be selling a yellow gold version of the Symbian-powered work of art for a cool €19,500 including VAT, which works out to about $27,000. Sure, that can buy a car — but you already own the fleet of Bentleys and Bugattis, so let’s be honest, another car would seem a bit excessive.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

How much will a gold Vertu Constellation Quest set you back? About $27K, turns out originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Citing “personal reasons,” the Symbian Foundation has just announced that executive director Lee Williams has left the company — yes, “left,” as in he’s not going to stick around for a while to manage a transition. Williams has been steeped in Symbian for some time, having previously led Nokia’s S60 business — but the dude’s been floating around the upper ranks of the entire mobile industry for ages, doing time with Motorola (through its Symbol acquisition) and Palm / PalmSource by way of Be. He’s been replaced by the organization’s reigning CFO, Tim Holbrow, and it appears that the appointment is permanent; what this means for Symbian’s roadmap (if anything) is unclear, but we’d love to hear the backstory on what led to this power shift. More on the situation as we get it.

Symbian boss steps down effective immediately originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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