Rick an I went to the annual Symbian show.

We’ve been very pleased with the new Symbian branding based on comics style.

The mole and its mechanics:

The unicycle sheep:

The switch robot:

You can download the Symbian Style Guide 0909 (.pdf – 11MB)

Grumpy: I would have prefered the new website symbian.org not using flash widgets. Flash does slow down the navigation on websites as well as your computer (especially if it’s a Mac OS X one)

You can also download the Symbian wallpapers from 240×320 to 2560×1600 pixels (that’s the resolution of 30″ screens )

And last download: exclusively for bou.me readers we’ve created a single A4 with all the illustrations (.pdf with each illustration independantly grouped and editable – 11 MB)

Last but not least, the opera stand:

If you don’t have Opera mini on your mobile phone, it’s a nice idea to get it!
The latest beta is really great. Opera mini is a small Java application that “talk” with a special Opera proxy.

What you see is pre-processed by Opera servers for your mobile screen. So it’s fast, it cost you less (you download less stuff from websites you visit).

You can see the page as you would see it on your desktop, albeit a zoomed version. But you can also use with the Opera’s mobile view which is for my taste the most efficient.
http://m.opera.com/next/
Yes rick, Skyfire is cool too.

What about the future of symbian?

Well… we did attend the talks, we even did take some pictures and some notes too!
The reality is with the 3 major platforms, if you want to develop a great application, you still need to develop for each one independantly.
3 times that is:
- the iPhone SDK using objective-C and Cocoa framework,
- the Android SDK using Java and their Android 1.6 or 2.0 framework,
- the Symbian SDK using C++ with preferably the QT framework.

What about the HTML/CSS/Javascript way ?
Palm WebOS, Nokia WRT widgets, iPhone standalone webapps, Android widgets etc. are interesting propositions but they are slow. Also each “widget” needs to be developed and tested separately.

So going “native” is still a very good investment. Maybe one day QT will change things. But at the moment it doesn’t run well… everywhere.

Ah.. the fairy tale of being platform independant.

At the end the best way to publish content on small screens is still to make web applications and websites but not optimized for small screens instead designed for mobility.
By mobility I mean the context of the user. And the behavior of mobile users, as defined since the Palm days, is simple:
1. Where is the gadget (in my pocket)?
2. Aim (bring the application in front of my eyes) immediately.
3. Shoot (do something or be entertained).
4. Lose the gadget again (back to the pocket).

And the web, because it works almost everywhere is a good plateform for this.

When the device get the network of course.

Which is… randomly (have you ever experienced the stress episode to finish and send that email before entering the tunnel?).

As users, we can’t expect our mobile phone to be always connected.. we have to thanks the network to give us a reliable fast connection (and possibly pray for it).

So the applications constantly has to deal with online status, then offline status then sync with the server.
Rince, repeat.
By making sure there is no waiting time during those states for the user and s/he can always continue to work.
This is an infinite problem to solve.

See?
See why we loved the new branding of Symbian?
It’s wacky! Like developing a mobile app!!

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Published on Thu 29 Oct 09, modified on Mon 30 Nov 09 at 6:36 (GMT) , by tibo.