Rambling Bloke

So the hardware side of the mobile industry has changed greatly over the recent years. Back whenever there were only a few manufacturers that had a ring fence on the mobile phone choices in your hand. Well that time is changing and changing fast. Just like the situation that occurred in the PC hardware market once upon a time there was a select few who built the personal computers. As time progressed cheaper and cheaper manufacturing came in and was deployed into sales channels. So the glory of personal computing was available at a great price to anyone with a small budget. Once that personal computer was at home and working they had the option of buying software to run on this piece of plastic, metal and silicon.

The similarities of what is happening in the mobile market are quite striking. The Industry is now seeing ever more operating system and software options for a mobile device. The cheaper manufactures are now looking at the industry with a keen eye and thirst to make it in this lucrative place. The once dominant manufactures are now having to try and compete with these cheaper players. Of course the branding and marketing spending will help the originals and is still very much in tact but as the operating systems take headlines in the press the old school will find it more difficult to stand out.

That being said you get what you pay for. If you want a cheap piece of plastic with an exciting operating system onboard go ahead. I am at the moment however not convinced by these cheaper alternatives no matter how much marketing is thrust into our faces about them.

So JavaME, well what to do. Oracle are I believe looking to swoop in a take Sun Microsystems over. The capability and depth to which Java as a language has reached is quite staggering. This is well documented all over the place in press and what not. The one issue that has dogged the mobile variety of the language is the shear variety of implementations out there. Ok so there is a huge installation base, as is always stated, I agree. However the variants of the implementation has long made deploying content a real headache. Unless you have a load of money and a load of patience to invent your very own build system to accommodate the said variations.

Couple this with the security model and all its challenges, then this makes for a harsh place to grow up if you want to begin in mobile. More importantly if you wish to make money for your efforts. So can the situation be rectified and pulled back to help JavaME be the ultimate runtime on mobile. The term openness appears again. I know that Motorola stated to begin engaging the community on MIDP 3. This was marketed as an opensource project and an attempt to bring the technology back form the virtual brink. However I have not heard much about MIDP 3 recently in the press or even in the discussions with folks who should be in the know. So is it dead? Could Oracle with its supreme eye for a smart buy look to drop the moble piece of the technology in favour of an Enterprise solution for it core business. Could this open the door for other runtimes to look to take the crown from JavaME in the lightweight mobile space? The jury is out at the moment…we shall see.

I have over the years been facinated by the way that tools have played a huge part in the sucess of a software platform. I recall Borland and Metrowerks and their suite of tools for mobile software development being launched. Of course they were prorietary and in quite a few cases challenging to use, however they were the only way to realistically get what you want built. So you had to pay the price quite literally for the ability to create what you wanted. So now with the creation of the Symbian Foundation comes a new era, I hope, for tools and mobile platform development. I hope, I mean I really do, that the openess described in the marketing material comes to the tools chain. At the moment I can say that the tools for creating applications on Symbian are, well, challenging and complicated. Now is that the fault of the platform, yes quite possibly. Can we change that, yes I think that we can given the opportunity to contribute our own code into the platform.

This is a critical point for me, there needs to be a guarantee that the tools chain is as open and flexible as possible. Without this then we are going to find that the time to create mobile applications will be too long to compete. I wonder what the lead time is for various smartphone platform development of a simple application. Has anyone looked into that? They must have. I wonder how the current Symbian platform tools chain compares to the likes of other native environments for say creating a simple network aware application? We need to strip the tools chain back to it basics and build up again, we need to invite the best open minded community members to participate in helping to get to where we need to be. In addition the community must build up it following in the emerging talents in the schools and universities to stand a chance of evolving at a rate to compete with the other players in this area.

I wonder if it will happen? I wonder if the creative people out there who want to develop for the platform can obtain the right tools for the times?

I have to say that the intentions of the Symbian Foundation are very admirable. It is also true, as many a reporter/journalist has already stated, Symbian had to adapt to the changing market. Once upon a time Microsoft had Symbian down as a major threat. Now it Symbian on the back foot to the Android and iPhone MacOS publicity machine. It is such a mistake to compare these different environment, and yet that appears to be the way things go. They are all seen as a ’smartphone’ OS and thus bundled up against each other in a niave attempt to increase RSS hits rates.

I do hope that the folks at the Symbian Foundation do not fall into the trap or comparing themselves too much to either Android or the iPhone. I agree that they should look at the huge interest and how simple application development could be. However Symbian Foundation must bring its best people and it best community advocates and evolve the platform into something attractive. Not just a platform that to be held up against others but one that stands out as its own entity and success.

The market is getting increasingly crowded and there will be fatalities. I hope that Symbian Foundation is not one of them, but there certainly needs to be some radical thinking there to avert that issue along with features that help solidify a platform for all. We shall see how it shapes up but I think there will be some heart stopping moments along the way.

Upon the Sony Ericsson mass market platform (known as OSE) the use of iTunes metadata inside mp4 audio files is not handled. This can manifest itself as Album, Artist or Album Art not being present when playing the content through the native player. You can determine if the metadata (also known as atoms)are iTunes types by using a hex editor or working with a freely available piece of software called Atomic Parsley.