Symbian Outlines Competitive Wireless Plan
(02/17/00, 2:25 p.m. ET) By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Seeking to build momentum for its Epocoperating system, Symbian, a U.K. joint-venture of Nokia, Ericsson,Motorola, Psion, and Matsushita, flew its engineers and technology road map to Silicon Valley this week to pitch it as the only viable, unified platform for advanced mobile wireless devices. And the company spelled out its plans to launch three different reference designs aimed at separate segments of the evolving wireless device market.
Despite growing fragmentation in the smart phone and communicator market, Colly Myers, chief executive officer of Symbian (London), reassured an audience of about 700 software developers gathered at the Symbian Developers Conference here that the company's Epoc operating system will serve as a core platform common to all of its partners' advanced clients.
Myers said that recent deals between Symbian's partners and rival OS vendors such as Palm Computing and Microsoft will not change the landscape of this very competitive market. "Eighty percent of Symbian's code, composed of operating system [5 percent], system layer [55 percent], and application engines [20 percent], will continue to be resident in a range of wireless devices," Myers said, even though some products may extend support to a non-Symbian user interface or application, he said.
"We don't mind, for example, that one of Nokia's mobile devices is designed to run Palm's user interface over the Symbian operating system," said Myers. "This is a new market. Nobody knows how it will shake out." He added, "But we do know that there will be a wide range of products. I think the market will have to go through a bit of Darwinian experimentation."
Lauri Hirvonen, senior manager of developer community at Nokia Mobile Phones (Tampere, Finland), agreed that the company's deal with Palm is an add-on strategy rather than a switch in the company's choice of platforms. Although Nokia will launch Symbian's Epoc-based product in the second half of this year, then another device in 2001 capable of running both native Symbian applications and "most Palm applications," Hirvonen said that "having a single platform is the key to drive the mass market. Developers hate to develop applications for so many different platforms."
Hirvonen added, "At Nokia, we don't buy paperware. We chose Symbian because of its lower memory size, lower processing power and lower energy requirement. But most important, we chose it because it would become the industry standard. It is not in Nokia's interest to be the only company to support" a platform not implemented by others.
Stakes are high for everyone vying for this rapidly growing wireless device market. In his keynote address, Myers predicted, "By 2003, one billion wireless terminals will be shipped. Of those, 500 million clients will be data-enabled."
The market for such data-enabled devices, however, is still in flux, with leading wireless handheld vendors scrambling to define form factors, user requirements, and applications.
To further complicate matters, browser-enabled handsets are becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of this market. Today's so-called "browser phone," however, is not the full-blown wireless information device for which Symbian's Epoc was designed. Rather, it's a handset equipped with a browser and a microkernel bolted onto a current-generation proprietary operating system that various handset manufacturers have used for years, according to Symbian.
The deal between Ericsson and Microsoft is one example of how the browser phone market is being addressed, Myers said. "The Ericsson/Microsoft deal is not about Windows CE; it's about incorporating Microsoft's browser on a phone running Ericsson's proprietary operating system," he said.
By 2003, Myers predicted, 35 percent of the total wireless device market will be held by such browser/WAP phones, with voice phones taking a 50 percent share and advanced wireless information devices -- Symbian's core target -- a mere 15 percent.
Various software companies, including Microsoft, Palm, and Phone.com, are all racing to capture a share of this booming data-phone segment. Though Symbian may miss the entire current-generation browser phone market, according to Juha Christensen, executive vice president of marketing and sales at Symbian, a premature entry would have forced Symbian to split its resources, and would have taken the company's focus away from solving the more complex issues on its own platform. Noting that Epoc provides robust, real-time capabilities for handling communications, "telephony integration is rocket science," he said.
Asked about browser phones, Myers said, "We don't think that they are in the same league as our Epoc-based platform."
By positioning his company's Epoc system as "a platform for advanced clients," Myers drew a clear hierarchy among clients for emerging wireless devices. In his view, the current generation of browser phones are "thin clients" totally dependent on the network, required to stay online all the time to access data, send, and receive e-mail, or buy and sell goods. Meanwhile, Myers said that "advanced clients" are designed from the ground up for robust and reliable mobile communication applications without failures, while giving mobile users the ability to work either online or offline. "It's a very different product concept from such thin clients that often are PDAs simply inserted with a wireless modem."
Even so, Symbian acknowledges the diversity of emerging wireless devices and is hedging its bets with a three-pronged device strategy for its platform.
Symbian outlined plans at its developers conference to launch three separate device family reference designs (DFRDs): one for smart phones, one for pen-based communicators, and another for keyboard-based communicators. Code-named Pearl, Quartz, and Crystal respectively, each DFRD will come with additional APIs specific to the user requirements of the particular device family. The different device families will share 80 percent of Symbian's core platform code, Myers said. Key differences among the device families will be user interfaces -- pen or keyboard input, for example -- and support for different screen sizes.
Symbian offered the first time glimpse of the functions and features of Quartz in a pen-based tablet communicator that used software emulation.
Said to be the furthest of the three families in its development, Quartz is a task-based communicator designed for a 320 by 240-pixel color screen and pen-based input. Psion, Motorola, and Ericsson are all preparing Epoc-enabled wireless devices based on Quartz for release later this year or early next year.
Crystal, also advanced in its development, though not demonstrated at the conference, has more in-depth features than Quartz, including keyboard-enabled communications and a built-in radio. "This is for more committed users," said Christensen. Crystal will support a 640 by 240-pixel screen.
Pearl, slightly behind Quartz and Crystal, is designed for small-form-factor smart phones with a 320 by 120-pixel screen.
All of the Symbian's partners are already deeply engaged in developing one or more device families based on the reference designs, Symbian said, though the company declined to provide specifics on when each DFRD will be completed. But Myers promised that there will be "six or seven different wireless information devices out on the market" from Symbian's OEMs in 2001 using the reference designs. |
