Finally, we have a distribution mechanism for S60 applications. Despite all the problems with developing for S60 — the steep learning curve, the painful testing procedure, the complex UIs — the primary barrier to releasing an S60 product has always been the same. How do we sell the thing?! The success of the App Store is purely driven by the ease of distribution*, allowing a developer to ship applications around the world at the touch of a button. Prior to OVI, the only way to sell an app on S60 was to either do it yourself (painful and expensive), use Handango (which takes a 50% revenue share!), or talk to an operator (requires the patience of Job).

Obviously it is going to be harder to develop an S60 application than an iPhone one. But the S60 platform is so much more capable than the iPhone that we can hope to see seriously innovative applications out there. Admittedly these will be priced at a premium level. But quality applications will drive a market, and increase the popularity of the S60 platform. It will be interesting to see whether an S60 phone becomes a status symbol in the same way that iPhone has done - and whether the applications you have on your idle screen become as telling as they do on iPhone!

Time will tell. Airsource will certainly be watching OVI with interest.

* Let’s be clear what we mean here. Distribution is not the same as Marketing. You still need to market your applications, no matter how you sell them.

I have just spent four days in Barcelona at MWC catching up on the industry developments. The main topic on everyone’s lips was The App Store, and by “The” App Store I mean Apple’s, not Nokia’s OVI offering or any of the other contenders.

Let’s take a little look at OVI. Nokia claim that there is an initial market of 50 million handsets. I disagree. Unless Carphone Warehouse go out onto the high street and start pulling people into their store and upgrading their phones for them, the vast majority of smart phone users are not going to install the OVI software. There are two reasons. Firstly, the entire motivation for an App Store on device is that users are not prepared to go through the pain of downloading software and installing it. So why, exactly, are they going to download software (OVI) and install it? Secondly, developing applications for S60* is simply a lot harder than developing them for iPhone, and takes more time. Moreover, those applications need to be tested on the entire range of OVI devices. So the applications either need to cost more (for the same number of sales), or have a wider market (which they haven’t got). With over 10 million iPhones out there, all with an active user population downloading and buying applications, Nokia need a very substantial uptake of their S60 handsets just to get applications shipping at anywhere near the same price level.

It isn’t going to happen. You read it here first.

Tomorrow - why I think that OVI beats the App Store!

* I realise that OVI supports S40 — i.e. MIDP — as well. I am ignoring MIDP since you can’t do anything that useful in it (games notwithstanding). It’s even more restrictive than the iPhone SDK.

Airsource woke up this morning to Nokia’s announcement to make Symbian an Open Source platform, and with it all the concrete platforms like S60, UIQ, and so forth. While Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT DoCoMo are all mentioned in the press release, it seems to me that they had little choice but to jump on board. From an Airsource perspective, S60 pretty much meant Nokia - and now Nokia will mean S60. At the very least, that might make our sales presentations easier.

This announcement is good news in two ways for Airsource’s business. Firstly, from a commercial perspective, it removes some of the cloud of doubt about what Android means for the market. Android did not exactly threaten the future of S60, the established leader in the convergent devices market , but it did cast some doubt on the subject. How would an open source competitor affect the market? Businesses, of course, hate doubt, and while S60 was ahead of Android on pretty much everything apart from source access, the playing field there has now been made more level. Obviously a $1500 charge (annual) for source access is not free, but it is vastly cheaper than the old fee to become a Symbian Platinum Partner.

Secondly, from a technical perspective, access to the underlying platform code helps the developer produce more stable products, faster. Some areas of code are always technically more complex and more poorly documented than others, such as MTMs. Access to source code will significantly ease development on the really cool stuff.

We at Airsource look forward to seeing more developments.

When we set up Airsource, we set it up as a BREW consultancy. We rapidly sold a number of BREW projects, and built on the expertise we had acquired while at QUALCOMM. In the process, however, we inevitably found ourselves working on other software platforms, particularly on Series 60, which now accounts for about half of Airsource’s work. Series 60 and BREW are often held up as competitors, though in practice I would argue quite strongly that they target very different markets. (more…)

I recently had the dubious pleasure of debugging a User 42 Panic on a piece of Symbian code that was given to me by another company. You always need to make sure you understand what the system is telling you, so I went straight to the documentation:

User 42: This panic is raised by a number of RHeap member functions, AllocLen(), Free(), FreeZ(), ReAlloc(), ReAllocL(), Adjust() and AdjustL() when a pointer passed to these functions does not point to a valid cell.

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