Symbian in Motion

Symbian Smartphone Show Recap

As I’m sure most of your read and know, I went to the Symbian Smartphone Show last week and covered it live using an excellent blog bot created by Palringo. I had a great time and met several very interesting people. I also stopped by some very impressive stands and learned plenty about some upcoming developments in the industry. Yes, we all saw the S60 Touch demo - but I wanted to highlight a few quick things for you guys that you might have missed if you weren’t following my coverage blog.

Firstly, S60 had a great stand at the show in a prime location next to the entrance. It was packed full of S60 team members showcasing a wide variety of newer developments from widgets to forum Nokia to Mosh and just about everything in between. They also had all of the newer high end devices laid out for all to play with.

Red Five Labs was there showcasing their upcoming solution - .NET Compact Framework for S60. The demo I was shown was quite impressive and consisted of a WM device and a Symbian device side by side running the EXACT same apps - literally the same exactuable files. This solution will certainly open quite a few doors for developers and facilitates the simplest possible means of porting WM apps to Symbian. “Porting” is actually a very poor choice of words as their framework allows WM apps to run unchanged on S60 devices!

Emoze was at the show highlighting their recent addition of Gmail push support and to announce their brand new addition of Google Apps support to their S60 client. For those who don’t remember or haven’t yet checked it out, I wrote an extensive comparison between several S60 push email options that was posted on All About Symbian. You can check it out here if you like. I was pleased to find that Emoze was a big fan of the article as they quoted it on both their marketing handouts and their display graphics! Emoze has some big plans for future updates of their push email solution so be sure to watch this space.

Probably the one app showcased at the show that I’m most excited about getting my hands on is Apadtxt by KeyPoint Technologies. To say that I NEED this app is a gross understatement. Since I received my N95-3 from Nokia I’ve been using it as my daily carrier. I’m having a tough time going back to my beloved E61i for one reason and one reason alone - RAM. If it wasn’t for the RAM I’m sure this device would be sitting in a drawer right now, only to come out once in a blue moon. Why, you might ask? Forget the terrible battery life and forget the crappy build quality and humdrum appearance - what I dislike most about the N95-3 is the 1-9 keyboard. I hate T9 with a passion and miss my full keyboard more than I can possibly express. If Adaptxt is as impressive as it looked while it was being demoed to me at the show, it really could be the methadone for my qwerty addiction.

Adaptxt is not simply a predictive input engine; it is an intuitive prediction engine that learns your patterns (both through usage and through the ability to import and analyze word patterns from an email or file) and can predict words before you even type them. Too great! Rest assured I’ll have my hands on this one the instant it emerges from the dreary depths of the Symbian Signing process and a full review will be posted shortly thereafter.

Dear Nokia, observe this app. Play with it, test it and notice how much it improves the text input process. Ok good… Now license it. T9 is outdated and and counter intuitive; a true blemish on the S60 OS. Ditch it, it’s almost 2008 for God’s sake!

The name “Simon Judge” is essentially synonymous with “Symbian Development”. Of course his knowledge is by no means limited to Symbian but if you were asked to name the first Symbian developer that comes to mind, Simon would be your answer. His personal work and consulting work speaks for itself and I was very happy to learn at the show that he has recently taken on a new endeavor - with Palringo! Simon will be bringing his years of experience to the table in continuing Palringo’s development of their multi-platform IM/vocal IM/photo IM app for S60. Personally, I can’t wait to see what they come up with next!

In the end it definitely turned out to be a great show. I also had a great time at the AAS pub meet and the Evening with S60 events that were held that week. I learned a lot, put some faces to a bunch of names, had a great time and even tried Marmite for the first time! If you weren’t able to make it to London last week I highly recommend you try your best to make it to the 2008 event next year which will surely be outstanding.

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