2. Again, to be honest, the current options to read PDF files on Symbian smartphones (since aeons ago) is pathetic.

3. On other platforms (iOS and Android), reading documents is a joy. For example, GoodReader is a very good documents reader which can read a number of formats.

4. On Symbian, years ago, to deal with common office files (ecept PDF), there was Documents To Go on Series 80, UIQ2 and UIQ3 but it never made itself available for Series 60 (S60) and also the modern Symbian^3. Why? I dont know…

5. Reading PDF on Symbian smartphones is a pain in the ass. I tell you.

6. The only software which I recommend on older Symbian smartphones is mBrainSoftware’s PDF+ which has a function called “Text Reflow”, no other software can read multi-megabytes PDF files on current Symbian smartphones comfortably.

7. Adobe’s implementation of it’s famous PDF Reader is a mess. It’s very slow, always freezes and the UI is not optimised for touchscreens. On Symbian^3 smartphones, it doesnt even support “pinch to zoom” and page rendering is slower than a snail climbing mount Everest!

8. So… What’s the best way to view PDF files on our beloved Symbian smartphones? At the moment, NONE!

9. But AlternateReader is a good option. It’s nowhere as good as other solutions on other platforms but it does the job satisfactorily.

10. Here are among it’s functions :
- Rendering PDF and Djvu documents
- Tap to go to next screen
- Tap to scroll down
- Go to Page
- Zoom in and out
- Full screen mode
- Accessing menu in fullscreen mode by press and hold

11. I have used it since I got my Nokia N8 and it does what it supposed to do. However, sometimes, when opening large documents, it struggles.

12. Get AlternateReader from http://sourceforge.net/projects/alternatedjvu/. It’s FREE! GRATIS! PERCUMA!

*** The file showed in these screenshots is from Tomi Ahonen‘s latest book called “The Insider’s Guide to Mobile”. It is a FREE eBook and can be downloaded from Lulu. If you are interested to know what’s happening in the mobile industry, read this book. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

1. Dropbox, the favourite free (up to 2GB) online storage that is loved by many. It’s got some cool features to keep your files in sync between your digital devices. And if you want more spaces, you can refer friends to use it or pay for the Pro accounts.

2. Dropbox offers it’s application for bringing files anywhere called Dropbox Anywhere for iOS, Android and Blackberry. Unfortunately, no love for Symbian yet…

3. There are many ways to experience Dropbox on Symbian smartphones. Among others, you can choose from :

- Using a tip by Rita el-Khoury
- Mobile web at http://m.dropbox.com
- Pixelpipe Send and Share (upload only)
- Furtiv (upload only)
- NDrop (from Ovi Store)

4. At the moment, there’s no official native Dropbox Symbian client developed by Dropbox itself.

5. But there’s a solution for that! It is very easy, it’s FREE and comes built-in inside many Symbian smartphones for years. Follow the instructions below to experience Dropbox inside your Symbian smartphones WITHOUT 3rd party applications.

6. This is possible because Symbian supports WebDAV protocol out of the box since S60 3rd Edition FP2.

7. Dropbox DOES NOT support WebDAV protocol but a conduit/connector has been developed called DropDAV. It’s free for the basic Dropbox account (up tp 2GB). You can read more about it at http://dropdav.com/.

Requirements

1. Symbian smartphones (S60 3rd Edition FP2, [some] Symbian^1 devices – [not all] and Symbian^3 only)
2. Dropbox account
3. Internet access

Step 1

1. Go to https://dropdav.com/. Note the https.

2. Register for free at https://dropdav.com/signup.php by using your Dropbox username and password. You can do this on your desktop using your favourite internet browser or you can also do it directly on your Symbian smartphones. I use Opera Mini 5.1 Beta 2.

Step 2

1. On your Symbian smartphones, open the default File Manager.

2. Select Option, then Map New Drive

3. Use the following as reference to fill in the fields :
- Name : Dropbox (or whatever you want to call it).
- Address : https://dav.dropdav.com (note the https).
- Choose the Access Point to connect to the internet.
- Username : Your Dropbox username (your email address registered with Dropbox).
- Password : Your Dropbox password.

Usage

1. There will be a new icon in the File Manager root view called “Dropbox” or whatever name you put.

2. To connect to your Dropbox account and access your files, you need to initiate the connection MANUALLY.

3. When connected. an indicator is displayed.

4. Once you are inside Dropbox, you can manage files to your heart’s contents. Dropbox is now part of your Symbian smartphone’s storage. You can rename, delete files, move, copy to and from your smartphone to Dropbox vice-versa etc.

5. However, all depends on the network speed. If you are on high speed connection such as 3.5G or WiFi, it wil be smooth. But if you are on EDGE, be prepare to crawl like a snake…

6. I think this is a convenient way to experience Dropbox on Symbian smartphones. Furthermore, there’s no cost involved if you are using the basic Dropbox account. For those with Dropbox Pro account, you can refer to the DropDAV rate at http://dropdav.com/. It’s only 30% of the Dropbox rate. E.g. You only pay USD3 monthly to DropDAV for the 50GB Dropbox Pro account (USD9.99).

7. So, how do you use Dropbox o your Symbian smartphones? Have you tried this before? How was it?

8. One more thing… It’s FREE. No 3rd party app to be installed. You only need to spend a couple of minutes configuring your Symbian smartphone.

- Asri al-Baker, December 4th 2010

1. I own and maintain 3 self-hosted WordPress blogs. This blog, SymbianKu.Com and MeeGoKu.Com. I choose WordPress for it’s simplicity, elegant and flexibility.

2. On my MacBook, I use an offline blogging client called Ecto. A superb and easy to use software that fulfills my blogging needs.

3. For Symbian S60 3rd Edition, there are some solutions available namely Telewaving’s Wavelog (not free), WordMobi (free, based on Python) and the official WordPress for Nokia client (free, based on Qt).

4. I’ve talked about how WordMobi helps me blogging on the move (HERE and HERE) and personally, it’s the most useful and feature complete WordPress client for S60 3rd Edition at the moment.

5. WordMobi is very stable, doesnt eat RAM like crazy and works brilliant. And I prefer using it for blogging anytime.

6. Another solution for WordPress blogging on Symbian is using an official application developed by the WordPress team. It’s using Qt technology and currently being developed heavily for Nokia Symbian smartphones and Maemo.

7. In order to use it on Symbian smartphones, you have to install Qt runtime or it will not work. You can get the necessary files from :

Qt runtime : Version 4.6.2
WP Client : Version 0.54a Self-signed

8. Although it is designed for touch-screen smartphones, it works on E90 but there’s some usability and stability issues. It crashes randomly, and sometimes it doesnt respond to keypresses. It also freezes when it cant cope with user’s action and to run it smoothly, you need to have plenty of RAM.

9. The design looks familiar. Any WordPress user will feel at home because it looks like the WordPress Admin Panel.

10. You can view and edit posts, comments and pages. But I think, it’s not ready yet to be used to write long and complete posts. It’s useful if you want to view and manage comments or write a short and simple posts.

11. On Nokia E90 Communicator, it works on both screen. But on the external screen, navigation is slower compared to the internal screen.

12. Other than the slowness and non touchsreen related issues, in my opinion, it also needs an offline mode.

13. Everytime I launch it, it will ask me to select Access Point to connect to the internet and I have to reject it by pressing cancel 15 times before can use it offline!

14. An offline function without the annoying prompts will enhance it’s usability even more. There should be an option for users to choose to connect to server for fetching and updating contents or stay offline.

15. The connectivity issue also happens when I toggle from one blog view to another. It will try to establish a connection.

16. Like I said, there are many user scenario where it fits perfectly okay for offline usage. One of them is to write short post or to draft an idea in an area without WiFi or internet coverage.

17. I believe the development team is working very hard to make sure this WordPress for Nokia application easy to use, stable, relevant and functional. And they are almost there.

18. Until it becomes really useful on E90, and optimised for non-touch operations, I am sticking to WordMobi at the moment.

19. But for you who own one of Nokia’s Symbian^1 touchscreen smartphones or N900 (Maemo 5), this is the most elegant solution for your WordPress blogging needs.

20. Visit http://dev.nokia.wordpress.org to follow it’s development. It’s a free open source project and you can also contribute to it’s progress.

- Asri al-Baker

2. Out of the box, Symbian supports multitasking since the glorious days of Psion.

3. The built in method in S60 to see the running applications in the background is to press and hold the Menu key aka the Applications key which will list opened applications.

4. If you want to close an application, press the delete or the cancel key while highighting an application in the built-in taskmanager.

5. There’s also some 3rd party applications for those who want more power in managing multitasking. Applications like Handy Taskman, Best Taskman and JBak Taskman are the most commonly known.

6. I prefer to use Best Taskman. Which, in my opinion, has better features for my needs.

7. Compared to Handy Taskman which looks more polished and better designed, Best Taskman doesnt score in the design department.

8. However, Best Taskman wins with regards to ease of use and quick access to most commonly used functions such as the task-switcher whic is unique. With a click of a button, Best Taskman displays a task-switcher which pops-up in the centre of the screen and allows user to toggle between opened applications quickly. It looks and functions just like the Alt-Tab shortcut on Windows PC.

9. Other than that, Best Taskman also offers quick-access shortcuts to applications. This can be configured in the setting.

10. Another important Best Taskman function for me is the ability to show hidden processes and if you want, you can kill any rogue process. It is one feature that is not available in Handy Taskman.

11. A quick way to close all running applications is also available from the menu. Very useful to quickly release RAM.

12. Best Taskman is also useful to view available RAM, internal storage as well as memory card space.

13. And if you fancy looking into applicaton details such as app uid and keep track of how many applications are installed, it’s just a few clicks away.

14. All in all, I’m comfortable using Best Taskman on my E90 because although it looks kinda ugly compared to Handy Taskman, it has unique features that are not available on other applications.

15. So, what’s your preferred multitasking tool? Care to share with us?

16. Get Best Taskman from Smartphoneware’s official website for only $7.95. A 15 days fully functioning demo is available for you to test to help you decide your purchase.

1. If there’s a Symbian application that I can talk about for hours, it must be Gravity.

2. It made my friends who use iPhones, Androids and other smartphone platforms jealous and wanting to use E71 just for Gravity.

3. What made Gravity so special? To me, it’s about the unique user experience and the amount of effort by Jan Ole, (the developer) put in to enhance Gravity.

4. I use Gravity mainly for 2 things. Twitter and Google Reader.

5. With usability in mind, Gravity pushed Symbian applications further by giving an intuitive user interface unlike anything else in we’ve seen.

6. Gravity is not a software that sits idle and do nothing. It’s (for lack of better word) ALIVE!

7. Those who have used Gravity would know that it’s not Twitter nor Facebook nor Foursquare nor Google Reader that make Gravity part of their life. It’s the lifestyle.

8. Bringing all these services into Gravity was fun. Using them in Gravity is a luxury.

9. What’s next? I’d say please bring Bloglines support and port it to other devices as well. Android, iPhone, Symbian^3 and beyond and to desktops as well.

10. Happy first anniversary Gravity!

1. Well, life is beautiful when you have options? Am I right?

2. We are seeing more anda more Symbian applications from the Far East. Which is very good.

3. Go Browser, is another internet browser from comes from China.

4. The user interface is beautiful, with kinetic scrolling, special effects and very nice font used. And it also uses server-side rendering like UC Browser.

5. However, it renders all pages as small screen. There is no page overview and I dont know how to change the views.

6. The biggest let-down, is the language. All the menus, the interface and everything about it are displayed in Chinese. I dont read Chinese so I cant change any settings.

7. However, Go Browser comes with a beautiful visual Menu which will assist users in navigating around the menu as well as browsing the internet.

8. Maybe the target market is the Chinese speaking people. But please, make an English version

9. Go Browser is available for Symbian S60, as well as for Java phones. You can visit http://go.3g.cn/index.html to download the proper version for your phone.

10. What do you think? You want to test another internet browser?

- Asri al-Baker

2. At the same time, there are also other 3rd party internet browsers. These can be native like Opera Mobile 10, Ozone, Skyfire (sucks!) and jB5 browsers. There are also J2ME browsers such as Opera Mini and Bolt.

3. Enter UC Browser, developed by UC Mobile Limited, or Guangzhou Ucfly Company, pretty unknown in the Western World.

4. UC Browser, now at version 7.0 is an internet browser designed for mobile devices and luckily for us Symbian users, they have released a native version (sisx installation) for us to use.

5. It uses server-side rendering which will fetch your data and compress them before sending them to your phone.

6. As a web-browser, UC Browser hosted many features like download manager, multiple window support, small screen view and many more.

7. It is free to use. You have to pay for the data, as usual or you can use it with WiFi.

8. I have used it for a couple of days but I found it not as good as Opera Mobile 10 especially with complex pages that requires javascript. However, UC Browser is faster than Opera Mobile 10 in terms of internet navigation and the UI itself.

9. If you want to test and use UC Browser, you can download it for free from the official download page.

10. Have you tried it yet? What is your opinion? Can it beat Opera Mobile 10?

- Asri al-Baker

2. They have developed really outstanding products for ER5, UIQ2, UIQ 3 and now they also produced applications for S60.

3. I interviewed Malcolm over email to ask him some questions that I kept in my mind since a few years ago.

4. I hope you guys will enjoy the interview, as much as I do

Malcolm Lithgow

Introduction

1. how do you do malcolm? what’s the weather like in australia at the moment?

Well, it’s hot and humid at the moment — getting close to Christmas time.

2. what’s your favourite past time killer? Other than sitting in front of your computer of course

Photography, including editing the photos and creating photo books is probably my favourite, though I also spend a lot of time reading and watching TV (particularly great shows like Lie to me, Lost, Doctor Who, etc.)

3. you use the word “Chief Dreamer”. It must be great to be able to live your dream! No?

The hard part is making the dream reality — or having dreams that have a chance of being realised. It’s good to be able to dream, though.

DreamSpring

1. you are active in the industry for many years now. since the psion days if i reckon correctly. how does it feel being able to survive the changes and challenges especially with regards to application development? many software houses from the psion days did not survive till today. secrets to your success?

Well, we’ve survived simply out of sheer stubbornness, I think. The Psion machines had a good community around them, although it seemed to have happened mostly because of the machines, not because of anything else Psion did.

The switch to Symbian both ushered in a deliberate focus on third party developers, but also an era of constant change and instability for them. We’ve spent most of our time porting from platform to platform, which has limited our ability to grow our portfolio or product feature set the way we would have liked. So far none of Symbian’s decisions have made our job much easier (hopefully Qt will be the first).

2. you only have 2 excellent products that are available to customers, dreamconnect and dreamlife. how do you survive all these years with only these 2 products? if it’s possible, would you mind sharing some numbers?

See the answer above.

3. you offer symbian products only. is there any plan in the future to dwell into other territories like Android, iPhone, Maemo, Windows Mobile, webOS etc? Surely, the market looks attractive enough to bring your products accross other platforms.

We keep our eye on all these platforms. I’ll share my thinking on each of this here:

iPhone:
Pros: easy to develop for; reasonably large market; good buzz
Cons: crowded marketplace; uncertain ability to reach market (depends on Apple’s whims, especially since we replace standard apps); crucial functionality missing from SDK (calendar alarms)
Result: not worth the risk for our current apps

Android:
Pros: growing market (for now); good buzz; various channels to market
Cons: poor development environment (multiple, different targets and UIs); small market; uncertain app delivery framework; uncertain future
Result: not worth the bother (I think Android is hopelessly over-hyped, like much originating from Silicon Valley)

Maemo:
Pros: growing market; easy development (Qt base plus full source); strong app shop (Ovi)
Cons: tiny market; relatively immature OS
Result: too small to bother with

Windows Mobile:
Pros: easy to develop for; various channels to market (and getting better); mature OS
Cons: uncertain future UI (like Symbian); crowded market
Result: best proposition, however still much smaller than Symbian

4. how about the challenges in developing the applications. surely, porting from one platform to another involves planning, structuring, documentation etc. how do you manage that?

Since we’ve done so many ports now, we have our engine pretty well separated from the UI. In fact, we have three types of code: engine (which is identical on all Symbian platforms), common UI (shared between UIQ and S60), and S60 (shared between 3rd Ed and 5th Ed). That’s a lot of flexibility and complexity. If we were writing from scratch we certainly wouldn’t do that.

However, the UI is always such an unknown. Developing UI’s is a much more iterative process than developing engines (the iteration is much finer grained). This makes it harder to plan for. Our S60 port, for example, surprised us by how hard it was to implement our vision using the S60 framework. It involved lots of attempts that had to be discarded eventually. The S60 framework is far cruder than UIQ, particularly UIQ 3. There were lots of controls we had to implement from scratch, and whole frameworks had to be improvised.

We involved testers in this a lot earlier in the process than previously, to ensure we weren’t simply pandering to our own tastes, and to handle the wide diversity of device types supported by S60. Of course, this didn’t make things go faster — quite the reverse.

Part of the difficulty is that, rather than starting with the SDK and following the “line of least resistance” in coding something (which many of the Symbian vendors clearly do) our approach is to start with the customer and then try to build something that meets their needs. This makes our job a lot harder. As an example, the split-screen edit view in DreamLife was an innovation that the UIQ 3 framework supported quite well, once you had figured out the complexities of that same framework. However, S60′s framework is very simplistic, and there’s just no way to support a split screen like that without basically rewriting it, so after various attempts we came up with the popup day grid in the edit view as a solution that worked well for the end user. However all this takes a lot of time, effort and learning.

5. How many people are there in your team?

We’ve had a peak of five or six people in the past, but we’re down to three now.

DreamConnect

1. are you satisfied with the result? i mean, looking at dreamconnect, in my opinion, the UIQ 3 version is the best. with better list view details, thumbnail support and stability. how can you make the s60 version better? what are the things you couldnt do in the s60 version that you wished you could?

Well, the lack of “mini detail view” in the list is one of the missing features of the S60 DC. We actually have a solution half-coded to that, so that would be nice to add. We’d like to add the missing things like Smart Find and Dynamic Messaging (I have ideas for a better UI for the latter), but these are real power-user features.

I’d like to improve the way the contact editor works, especially for things like long notes and for 5th Ed. There are many other features that have been on our todo list for so long (some since the EPOC days) but have never seen the light of day because of the constant porting to new UI frameworks!

DreamConnect ER5 (Psion)

2. for years, s60 built in Contacts application is too minimalistic and too simple for advanced users. for example, if a contact has a long note, you need to press Options and selet Edit to view the note. Not very user friendly I must say. dreamconnect solve this and many other problems. however, it is not entirely integrated to the S60 system. say for example, one wants to save a new contact from the last received calls, the system is still using S60 contacts. what do you think?

DreamConnect S60 5th Edition (Symbian^1)

This is an issue I raised with Symbian way back before S60 even existed. The idea of being able to redirect application “vectors” to 3rd party apps. Nowdays it could be very easily done with ecom or equivalent and good API’s. Still not happening, though… It’s not really in Nokia’s (short term) interests, to be honest, so why should they bother?

3. will dreamconnect be the default Contacts application for the new Symbian Foundation UI? Is it even possible? Because in my opinion, you guys will prevent a lot of headache by including dreamconnect (or even dreamlife!) inside all futere Symbian devices

We can dream. Having looked at the source for the Contacts application (as a foundation member), I think it more likely that DreamSpring could contribute certain UI technologies, but we haven’t started down that path yet — that’s a radical change to our development and business practices and requires a lot of figuring out. How do we make money to survive?

4. historically speaking, your ER5 version of dreamconnect is your only product, then you move into UIQ 2 followed by UIQ 3. but all those platforms can be considered dead now. only now you venture into S60. in your opinion, which is the most flexible and better symbian platform?

The best platform so far was undoubtedly UIQ 3. S60 5th Ed has better underlying technology (if only because it’s based on a newer instance of Symbian), but UIQ 3′s UI was wonderfully flexible, and was developing in a good direction. All that was really lacking in UIQ 3 was a decent GUI UI developer, like Qt’s Creator.

DreamConnect UIQ 3

It was very frustrating to see UIQ 3 dumped in favour of S60 (though understandable). But the rapid switch away from S60 to Qt, while also understandable, rubbed a lot of salt into still-raw wounds.

5. What is your future plan for dreamconnect?

Connecting DreamConnect to services has always been our vision. Unifying contacts (and calendar) in a powerful and business-friendly way is something that no-one (even MS) seems to be taking that seriously. It’s something we’re still keen on, and may result in some radical changes to what we think of as DreamConnect.

DreamLife

1. if i remember correctly, you coined the phrase “Life Information Management“, which is still used widely on your website and your products’ info sheet. where does it come from and what is the philosophy behind it? What’s wrong with “Personal Information Management”?

We wanted to find a way to express how this information (contacts and calendar) was connected together and involved the whole of your life (including work), not just personal stuff. Thus we came up with the term “Life Information Management”, which has taken on a life of it’s own, I’m proud to say.

2. And DreamLife is one of the ways to achieve Life Information Management? How? How about other products?

DreamLife takes the first steps of (a) properly linking contacts and calendar so you can navigate from calendar to contacts (and back again at some time in the future); (b) of implementing an information categorisation system that’s powerful enough to handle your whole life — in DL and DC that’s done with heirarchical categories, in future we want to have even more powerful mechanisms.

Most other products on mobile devices don’t seem to understand the way that a mobile device can act as a hub of your whole life — both integrating and differentiating personal and business data. Indeed, mobile devices are so bad at this that most people who need to differentiate between personal and business data simply carry two phones!

We’re certainly not there yet, and the constant race to keep up with Symbian’s course changes are making it very difficult…

DreamLife UIQ 3

3. With limited screen real estate on mobile devices, displaying valuable information will require a lot of compromises. I mean, looking at DreamLife’s calendar pane, I can see you are moving away from the traditional calendar display on mobile phones (weekly view, daily view, monthly view). You are bringing more desktop-like calendar experience to mobile devices with colour support for different categories (which brings reference to modern desktop calendar solution like iCal and Google Calendar). Why DreamLife was designed that way?

I’m a visual planner. To me a list of appointments of tasks conveys very little information. But a grid view shows me at a glance how I’m using my time (especially with coloured categories). It’s that simple. I recognise that there are a lot of people who work better with lists, and at present DreamLife simply isn’t suitable for them. I make no apologies for that. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be able to meet those people’s needs, too — we do, but we saw an opportunity to both differentiate DreamLife and meet the needs of visual planners like me, and we took that opportunity.

4. you have a standalone contacts manager, which is DreamConnect. But you dont have a standalone calendar application. You could have 3 products. A contacts manager (DreamConnect) , a calendar (?), and a combination of both (DreamLife). And sell them separately. Right?

We could, and we’ve gone so far as planning such a project, however we haven’t had a chance to follow through on it yet, and I remain doubtful of the value of such an effort.

5. What is the future plan for DreamLife? Will it include it’s own synching engine to sync with the cloud say to Google Calendar or MS Exchange Server or SyncML servers?

We’re well into development of our syncing solution, which I was demoing at SEE 2009. We have our own CalDAV technology which we’ve integrated with some tech from Symbian’s new CalDAV component, so we have a solution for FP1, FP2 and 5th Ed phones. We’re aiming our initial release at supporting public CalDAV servers like Google and Yahoo!, but in future we’ll be implementing our own services.

Others

1. why symbian?

See the discussion above, and add in the fact that Symbian is far larger than any of these markets.

2. what happen to riyala?

We’re still working on that, but we realised that we really don’t want to release a half-baked solution and have the sort of problems that, say, Mobile Me has had. So it’ll be quite a while yet…

3. The future of the new Open Source Symbian is not written on the wall yet. Nothing is concrete. What do you think about Symbian walking the Open Source path? How Open Source will benefit you as an independent software vendor?

Actually, I’ve just written a piece on that in our “Insight” blog. You can see it at http://www.dreamspring.com/news/insight-2009/symbian-moving-toward-openness.html

4. UIQ died and efforts are made to bring some of it’s designs and functions into the new Open Source Symbian. Do you believe there will be some UIQ legacies inside the new Symbian Foundation OS? What UIQ functions that you hope will be made available inside this new OS?

I’m afraid I’ve given up on that one. However, one of the greatest UI innovations in UIQ 3 (apart from the complete touch/keyboard integration) was the list view with it’s “mini-detail view” expansion. That was very clever, and I’d like to see a list view widget like that again.

5. But it’s still a long way to go. Symbian^4 which is said to unite S60, UIQ and MOAP under one roof, wont see the light untill somewhere in the end of 2010. That’s like a gazillion years in the mobile industry. Technology moves forward so fast where something would become obsolete and old-fashioned very fast. Your opinion?

Symbian’s current attitude that S60 is simply abandoned come Symbian^4 is very foolhardy to my mind. After all, Symbian^4 is both some time away, but also relatively close. Thus you’re telling developers don’t bother developing for S60 because we’re chucking it in a couple of years, but don’t bother developing for S^4 either because we haven’t created it yet. Does that make sense to you? And the only reason I’ve heard for discarding S60 from future phones, from a Nokia engineer, was ludicrous: the S60 libraries would take up too much RAM! Come on, how much has RAM grown in the last couple of years — Nokia needs to get a grip on reality here. I attribute MS’s successful dominance of the PC industry to two things: anti-competitive practices (which they’ve been convicted of) and unstinting attention to backward compatibility. Without the latter the former would not have been sufficient — ordinary people buy Windows PC’s because they know that virtually anything that want to run on them will more-or-less work. When that breaks down, MS suffers and quickly moves to fix it. Nokia and Symbian should be paying attention to that valuable lesson.

6. Qt will replace Avkon. Does that mean you will have to re-write all your codes from scratch? What is your opinion about Qt on Symbian’s future?

No, just the UI component, which is a huge part of our code, anyway. I have very mixed feelings about this, see above. However, Qt really impressed me with the demo I saw at the show, and if Nokia can get the Symbian widget set right (and preferably shared by other platforms) then it could make things a lot easier for us in the long run.

7. Does DreamSpring contribute to Symbian Foundation? In what way?

Apart from our membership fee we are currently too busy porting to S60 to contribute much. However we’re always looking for ways that we can contribute. There’s much less benefit for a small products company than for a large company (like Sun) or a services company (like Ixonos), so we need to bear that in mind.

8. The trend nowadays is to sell applications through application stores. You know, Nokia Ovi Store, Sony Ericsson PlayNow, Samsung Mobile Club and so on. Do you put your products inside these stores? How’s the market acceptance? Your opinion about application stores? Is it just a trend?

No, I think it’s here to stay. However, I think subject-specialist app stores are a likely development, and I’m glad to note that Horizon supports this sort of development.

9. Tell us 5 favourite 3rd party Symbian applications that you use daily and cant live without? Is it true that the value of smartphones and advanced mobile devices are measured according to what the users want? Not what the devices can do?

Obviously DreamConnect and DreamLife get a heavy workout, and not just for testing but because I really use them. Also Opera Mobile 10 is great, Mobireader (which really needs a 5th Ed version), Worldmate (or now PsiLoc World Traveller) is very handy, and Olive Tree bible software.

10. Will you see Symbian Operating System evolving into something bigger, not limited to smartphones? Say, in the future, people create their own Symbian based distributions for say, netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices (MID), satnav devices etc?. Look at Linux, there are hundreds of distros available. Will we see Symbian going to that route? It’s Open Source anyway.

It’s possible, but I think Linux has really filled that niche, certainly in terms of mindshare if not competence. Symbian’s core strengths are its great real-time kernel and its strong suite of comms and PIM support. Maybe an eMagazine reader, or the old communications hub idea (a Pocket Server instead of a Home Server), or something like that?

Thanks a ton Malcolm!
—

Visit DreamSpring’s official website http://www.dreamspring.com to loearn more about DreamLife and DreamConnect.

Read my review of these products at allaboutsymbian.com :

1. DreamLife for UIQ 3

2. DreamConnect for UIQ 3

- Asri al-Baker

2. Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2 has been updated to Build 353. If you are using an older version, you can check the Build number by entering opera:about in the address bar.

3. According to a forum post at Opera Community, the new Build adds S60 native input, much like typing on other S60 applications and it does support T9.

4. The full forum post is reproduced here :

Update to Opera Mobile 10 beta 2 available with S60 native input support

We have now released an updated beta 2 release for S60 with full native input support (also known as FEP support). This means that when typing in Opera Mobile 10, you can use any input mode that is supported on your phone, in the same way as when e.g. typing text messages.

Get the Opera Mobile 10 beta 2 update from www.opera.com/mobile/download , or go to m.opera.com/next/ with your mobile phone. As before, remember to choose the International version if you want support for Asian characters.

Supporting different input types and methods is a complex matter, so we’d appreciate your feedback to improve this further for the next release. Please post all input-related feedback in this thread!
And thanks again for all your valuable input so far

Known issues:
-Not all input modes have a visual indicator.
-For some devices with non-latin input mode, you need to manually set the input language to English to input a web address in the address bar.
-On touch devices, the enter key does not work as an action key. For cases where an action is required (e.g. when adding a bookmark folder), we recommend using the Opera keyboard (available from advanced settings).
-Cut in context menu does not work on keypad devices.
-Some issues when using predictive input in the url field.

5. I have tested it on my E63, and it is very easy to use. To paste text (URL) from the clipboard into the address bar, just highlight the address bar, press and hold the OK (D-Pad center) and a context menu with “Paste” will appear. Really useful!

6. Have you used this latest version yet? If yes, what is your opinion?

7. Point your browser to http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/ or http://m.opera.com/next to download it.

2. It’s the first (and only) native Symbian application at the moment dedicated to Facebooking. Previously, it’s available for S60 touch only. Now for non-touch.

3. The strength of Symabook is it’s UI. It doesnt follow standard S60 UI at all.

4. The UI is graphically appealing. Where menus and options are presented differently.

5. In this early test version, the developer decided not to put a lot of functions into it. They are rather basic Facebook stuff like Status Update, Friends, and Profile.

6. In terms of usability, currently, it’s not very stable. For example, if you click the menus a few times, Symabook will halt. And brings down the system. I mean, it makes the phone freezes. Have to take the battery out. This happened a few times during my test.

7. Designwise, I kinda like the way Symabook works. It has kinetic scrolling to view long list, photos are rendered clearly, and it’s fast.

8. The UI is one of a kind. Not to say it’s bad or good but it’s different and pretty easy to use once you disassociate it from your normal S60 UI.

9. The information displayed looked like ”floating” on the screen. I dont know how to put it on words but ”floating” is close

10. Have you tested Symabook yet? What do you think? Is it better than the S60 Facebook Widget?

11. If you want to contribute in developing it by giving feedbacks, please download it from : Symarctic Solutions .

- Asri al-Baker

Posted by Wordmobi