[CoMoDev] Meeting on Tuesday
- From: David Beers <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <comodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 10:04:08 -0700
Hi all,
Kevin Cawley has agreed to give us a presentation Tuesday night about his
initial foray into developing software for the Symbian OS. As many of you
already know, Symbian is the #1 OS for smart phones worldwide, though the fact
that the US lags a couple of years behind Europe and Asia in smart phone
adoption has meant that most US consumers have been less familiar with Symbian
than with Palm, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. Now that smart phones are
starting to take off here the same way they have elsewhere, handset vendors
like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, BenQ and Siemens are starting to team up
with the US carriers to get their their devices into the US market. Symbian is
about to join the US smart phone fray in a big way, just as 3G networks are
starting to fire up around the country.
Recently my beloved Palm OS Samsung i500 phone started to be unreliable in the
house, which was a problem since it's my main business phone. I was always on
the edge of Sprint's network here and when the neighbor fired up a WiFi network
to compete with the one I have in our house I think the spectrum competition in
the vicinity of 2 GHz pushed the Sprint phone over the edge. After testing
with some friends phones I decided that Cingular was really the only carrier
that had good coverage here, and decided to order a Nokia 6620 that runs
Nokia's Series 60 platform, which is basically a vendor-customizable UI overlay
on top of Symbian 7.0. Basically, I've been fairly impressed. Series 60 is
for the lower end of the smart phone spectrum, which means devices that don't
have touch screens and can be had for under $250 (sometime *way* under $250
once you kick in the rebates from the wireless provider) but it still manages
to have pretty complete PDA functionality. It's intuitive and powerful, though
I admit I'm going through Graffiti withdrawal and finding the tiny keys on the
6620 to be hard to use for text entry. If I can make it to the meeting I'll
pass it around and offer a few comments so people can get an idea what it's
like.
I say "if I can make it" because I've got some outpatient surgery the following
day that's going to put me out of working condition for a few days, which means
I'm in a huge crush to finish some things up here before by right arm goes into
a cast. :-( Hopefully I'll still be able to make it.
If anyone else has some show-and-tell they'd like to do, please let me know.
Remember these don't have to be formal presentations: anything that can be food
for discussion is welcome.
We're meeting at Microsoft as we did last time. RSVPs appreciated.
David
=========================
David Beers, Moderator
Colorado Mobile Developers
www.comodev.com
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