Symbian Foundation faces up to challenges

What was billed as a roundtable discussion for members of the new Symbian Foundation turned into an opportunity for them to lay out the challenges and threats to their fledgling group.

Speaking at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the members expressed their support for the foundation but also revealed concerns about how it will work and how successful it will be at garnering wide support. The Symbian Foundation will soon release its first batch of source code as it transitions to an open-source mobile platform.

One of the most important issues raised was how to attract and encourage developers, since the foundation will face strong competition from popular platforms including the iPhone, the BlackBerry and Android.

The foundation doesn't intend to create its own applications store, but it will support phone makers and other members who want to set up their own, said Lee Williams, the Symbian Foundation's executive director. And it will have a process for certifying applications, similar to the former Symbian Signed program, ensuring they'll work on Symbian devices, Williams said.

Individual members may also have their own programs for developers. Nokia, for example, is rolling out an application store and a process for developers to build programs and sell them there. Applications created through that process will be designed to work across Nokia devices, but they won't necessarily be Symbian specific, said Oren Levine, head of innovation platform marketing, devices R&D for Nokia.

Asked if he thought there could be a conflict between Symbian's efforts to build developer relations and those of member organizations like Nokia, Levine said he did not know, reflecting the uncertainty companies have around supporting Symbian while at the same time promoting their own platforms.

It's possible the types of developers who will be attracted to the Symbian program and those who will develop for Nokia's Ovi platform will be interested in different types of applications. The Symbian developers may focus primarily on low-level innovation, Levine said. If so, they would work on decidedly less "sexy" applications then those that create buzz in the iPhone App Store, but are important nonetheless. They could work on ways to significantly increase battery life, for example.

"There's a lot of focus on application development in games and apps that make 'body noises,' but there's a whole world of developers doing enterprise apps, communications, security apps and extending the capabilities of what a mobile phone can do. When you're talking about that, you need access to the guts," Levine said.

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