Post date: Nov 18, 2010 2:11:17 AM
This blog is primarily about Internet Radio/TV, so why is there stuff on something like Symbian or even computer languages? In this day and age, any undertaking involving consumer media would be sorely inadequate without addressing the mobile sector. Convergence of consumer electronics, computers and communications have resulted in an architecture that is strikingly similar for nearly all consumer electronics from PCs, to phones, to Walkmen (?). The mobile sector is the fastest growing of all the consumer electronics sectors and ignoring this part would be wasting a golden opportunity at best.
Developing the topic from the last posting, Symbian would be the first choice in terms of market share. However, just like everything else, there are many issues that would affect using Symbian. Not least amongst them is this
http://www.fiercewireless.com/europe/story/nokia-sidelines-symbian-low-end-makes-300-staff-redundant/2010-10-22
Putting the brakes on Symbian would be discouraging to anybody who wanted to develop apps in it. However, Nokia has the Nokia Qt SDK, which is a cross-platform development environment targeting Symbian, Maemo and soon, Meego. Only issue is of the three OS offered by Nokia, Symbian is seeing the tail end of its life, Maemo is on the way out and Meego, is still in the process of building market share. An application developer looking at the situation wanting to minimize Return On Effort doesn't have an ideal situation with any of these three. Of course Meego has much to offer being jointly supported by Nokia and Intel but then again, that is in the future and the future looks divided.
Assuming that Meego successfully ramps up, it will have to "share" the market with IOS, Android, Blackberry OS and the latest kid on the block Win 7 mobile and that reads like a 5 way split. So in the long term, the app developer will not be eying the Symbian's present 37% market share, but Meego's POSSIBLE 20% market share.
The mobile application market will evolve like any other market. Its products / services will become more complicated as the developers bring on more sophisticated apps. Technically again, implementation of sophisticated applications in a C/C++ environment should be more efficient than in a Java based environment. But Qt being cross-platform, has to ensure that it can generate targets from 3 different OS's so at any time, Qt can only do the intersection of application sets available to each OS. This is definitely no small task and one wonders whether this will cause Nokia to introduce new features and technologies into its OS's at a slower rate than its competitors.