Ewan's Musings
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman in England.
Continuin on from yesterday's entry, here's what I got up to on Tuesday at Nokia's Series 60 Community Awards in Nice.
Tuesday 28th, Hotel Negresco, The Seminars
I thought grabbing some breakfast on the way to the Hotel Negresco, where the Conference was being held, wouldn't compare to the Breakfast available to the delegates. My two croissants and a coffee... 2 Euros 10. The continental breakfast at the hotel (which was.. two croissants and some coffee) was 32 Euros.Which mens four of those amazing breakfasts would have covered Rafe and I's room for two nights. Crazy.
There were four Seminars in the morning, each covering an area of the Series 60 world. Noia talked about the Series 60 ecosystem (to borrow a phrase from Symbian), follwed by a hi-energy presentation on the new Sendo X phone.
Speaking of the Sendo X, I managed to get some hands on time with the phone that afternoon. The only real dissapointment is that while the pre-release versions have been built, iMac style, with smoked clear plastic around the side walls - which I thik is gorgeous - the final version will be a traditional plastic colour.
Beyond that, I think the Sendo is going to be the Symbian Series 60 phone of choice. It's much more compact (about the size of a Nokia 3300, points ou Martin on Mobitopia), has a gorgeous screen, and with 30MB of on board RAM (plus hot-swapping of the MMC/SD card, take note N-Gage) it's the phone the 6600 should have been.
And the OPL runtime has no problems running on it. Whee!!! I even mentioned the possibility of allowing OPL plugin's on the Sendo Now! screen, and thats something that Sendo cold be interested in.
Back to the seminars. After a break for Coffee, we moved on to hear how T-Mobile has been using the Series 60 phones in the German and UK market place. Through T-Zones (T-Mobile's "we're not calling it Wap" Wap Site) you could see that the networks are using the extra features in the Series 60 to drive up revenue.
Finally we had a look at the Developer persepctive, from Nadav gur of Mobimate. Mobimate have one great product, and that one app (WorldMate) pretty much drives their copmpnay. The talk showed that everything around the software (the brand, the understanding of users, even down to the screenshots you choose) affects sales. Given that most of those people in the room were already successfull software people, I hope Nokia gets a copy of this seminar on Forum.Nokia, as I think it needs to be read by a lot of the smaller developers. Perhaps a candidate for one of those Developer Days Symbian is promoting just now?
Tuesday 28th, Hotel Negresco, Afternoon Demo's and Chat
Now this was the most valuable time for Rafe and I - a chance to meet and talk face to face to all the software houses, companies, and developers that we have had e-mail contact with throughout the year. What's great is that a lot more people were familiar with us than at the Dev Expo back in April - and those that hadn't were genuinly interested.
I'm no going to rattle off everyone here, because a lot of the talk ws between All About Symmbian and the companies, but highlights included PsiLoc, who had come to meet us with a specific goal in mind (which is always nice, especially as it was realistic). Dag from Opera is always a deight to talk to aout everything in general. Chris and James from FastMobile brought us up to speed in the Push To Talk space. And seeing the Flash Player nd some excellent user interfaces through Flash from David Manni restores my faith in single part-time developers being able to fight with the big boys.
Part Three over the weekend, including the Awards Ceremony!
Posted by Ewan at October 31, 2003 12:57 PM