Panel discussion chaired by Simon Rockman — Sony Ericsson
This was a rather boring panel discussion: despite Simon’s best attempts to make the panellists squirm, they stayed very tame and non-committal. The best bits was the thinly veiled spatting between Microsoft and Google — but again, this was nothing new…
Panel
- David Wood: Research @ Symbian
- Olivier Bartholot: Purple Labs
- Andy Bush: LiMo
- Rich Miner: Google Mobile
- James McCarthy: Mobile Comms Business @ Microsoft
Why is your OS the best?
- Symbian:
- Paul Otellini’s demo was based on a big server behind the couch + user experience was a bit rubbish
- More to be done in terms of cooperation & collaboration
- Defragmenting: removing all UIs but Series60 (UIQ officially dead)
- Purple Labs:
- Created in 2001
- Used to make phones and software, now just software
- Specialist of Linux on low-tier device — Purple Magic handset
- Acquired embedded software of OpenWave — including browser, messaging & widget platform
- Platform is LiMo compliant
- Acquiring engineers from Sagem + s/w for 2G & 3G phones from TI
- Hoping to fight fragmentation
- LiMo:
- gave a good description of how LiMo works as an organisation, but not how it would be better as an OS
- Android:
- Hardware available, but software not available to make it easy to use for customer
- Software being designed by hardware engineers
- So Apple was able to embarrass the industry by coming from a software perspective
- Google has struggled with building MIDP apps that work on lots of devices
- Decided to build their own OS — led Android as chief design architects
- Not as a committee
- Windows Mobile:
- Started in B2B, syncing PDAs to PCs, then added radio
- “4 out of 5 top global OEMs signed to run Windows Mobile”
- though they don’t necessarily run them on their major devices…
- Of the people on this panel, we’re the only ones with a single entity controlling the architecture
- spreading FUD as usual… Symbian now totally controlled by Nokia
How does your business model work?
- Android:
- Google has no direct business model with platform
- Also have 4 out of 5 top OEMs working on Android handsets :-)
- Believe that it’s fundamentally important to industry that no one company owns the platform
- Don’t mind playing on a level playing field, but don’t like someone else owning the platform and having an advantage
- Want to have powerful devices connected over broadband
- Focussed on delight & delivering value to consumer
- Then give useful ads based on understanding of context
- Not rushing to integrate ads right now
- Other platforms manage to bloat themselves…
- Android designed to go downmarket quite easily
- Runs fine on 200MHz (used this speed chips in design process)
- Within in next 18mths most devices will be able to support Android
- Simon Rockman disagrees — still going to be b&w, low end devices in sub $50 market
- Rich Miner thinks that in developing economies with phone as first screen, there will be big advantages and incentives to have higher feature phones pushed into market
- I tend to agree with Rich — it’s worth the while of the operators to subsidise handsets in developing countries, so that they get the revenue of usage. Vodafone seems to be going this way already.
- Purple:
- Latin America buying handsets at $25 but voice only
- Is a space for low $100 handset
- LiMo:
- Companies pay for membership fees
- Can share patents within IP Safe Harbour
Are you disappointed that people just rebadging HTC devices? (to Microsoft)
- Now seeing a lot of success with Samsung too
- Sony Ericsson X1 also made by HTC
- Also lots of ruggedized PDAs
- James not unsettled that HTC adopting Android
- I think he should be!
Why can Google bring in developers better than Microsoft?
- Always an advantage to start with a clean slate…
- Android also based on a lot of existing pieces
Motorola stopping Symbian and going to Android…
- David Wood: manufacturers currently hedging their bets
What about runtime environments?
- Google: 3rd party dev based on managed code
- Also browser in the core — can make AJAXy apps using this
- No reason why there can’t be other runtime environments
- Believe that native code is best way to write apps
- Microsoft: Also believe that native is best
- If we need other runtime environments to support customers then will provide them
- Symbian:
- Development often needs to get to native, so need to solve this problem anyway
What makes a smartphone smart?
- Symbian: Smartphone is programmable
- Featurephone has features, smartphone open to new features
- Microsoft: Want to provide
- “Featurephones only support voice calls and text” — what!
- Google (Rich Miner): smartphones haven’t been very smart
- first smartphones at Orange, could barely make phone calls on them
- hey, guess what — they ran Windows Mobile :-)
