7 Days and Counting!
From VNUNet, a preview of next week's Symbian Exposium Dev Conference. I bought my plane tickets, reserved my room, made plans for beer... woohoo!
Delegates gathering for this year's Symbian exhibition in London are hoping that 2003 will be the year that the company beats off the challenge from Microsoft.
At the exhibition, to be held on 29 and 30 April at the Excel centre in London's Docklands, Symbian will be launching the new version of its phone operating system, OS 7.0s, and broadcasting a move to a more open development environment.
"This year the drivers for Symbian will be consumer-led," said Andy Buss, a senior analyst at Canalys.
"Businesses aren't ordering smartphones in bulk and consumers are still driving the market.
"This year will see the start of large-scale business interest in smartphones, and Microsoft's developer network has left Symbian weaker in this area."
The new operating system should have support for the OPL development language reinstated, after it was dropped in version 6.
OPL, a Psion development environment, is popular among developers, and the company indicated in December that it would be making OPL fully open source to stimulate its use.
The move coincides with David Levin's appointment as chief executive of Symbian earlier this month.
Levin has a long history with Psion, including holding the posts of finance director and chief executive, and the company is still Symbian's biggest shareholder.
The roles of both Levin and Psion are considered crucial to the development of the Symbian platform.
The problem with this article is that Symbian has already beat the pants off Microsoft even before the race has started (well, no, the gun went off in December I think). It's all about Symbian doing what it can to avoid the pitfalls of Apple, Netscape, Palm and the rest of the once market-leaders...
Woohoo! Can't! Wait!
-Russ