I was at the Smartphone Show last week.  It was much larger than previous years and there was more of a buzz about the place than before.  I'm sure this had something to do with the soon-to-be-created Symbian Foundation.

One of the big news items from the show was the nomination (can't actually be appointed yet because the foundation won't exist until Nokia's acquisition of Symbian goes through) of Lee Williams, currently head of S60, for the role of Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand he is almost uniquely qualified having been the first head of S60 to have other licensees than Nokia get products out in a sensible timescale.  He knows the whole platform that will form the core of the foundation releases.  He's a very capable and enthusiastic communicator.  On the other hand, I think politically it would have been much better to appoint someone from outside Nokia, possibly even from outside the industry.  Preferably someone with some open source credentials.  The message from the keynotes at the show was that it's all about developers.  I don't think this appointment really confirms that.  Then again, I'm sure Lee will do a great job and I wish him the best of luck!  He's just going to have to work extra hard to demonstrate the independence of the foundation when Nokia is doing most of the early development work on the platform.

There was a lot of exciting news for developers at the show, with plenty of new stuff to play with now, or look forward to shortly.  At the Forum Nokia stand there were lots of demos, including Carbide.c++ 2.0 and Qt on S60.  It was great to see the new architectures in Symbian OS (Screenplay & Freeway), that were not much more than powerpoint slides at last year's event, with impressive demos on the Symbian stand.  However, the most exciting things (yes I get excited about some pretty geeky things!) on the Symbian stand were the new Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW) and version 2 of the build system, that runs on Linux as well as Windows.  The SAW tools are for debugging and performance analysis, they're available as plug-ins for Carbide.c++.  They look similar to, but better than, the current Carbide performance investigator tool (part of the expensive Pro and OEM verisions).  Currently they're only available to Symbian partners on the SDN++ site but the suggestion was that once the foundation is established they'll be free to everyone (hopefully with the other critical Caribde.c++ feature - on device debugging).

Of course, for me, one of the great things at the show was finally seeing my writing published in the Symbian Multimedia book, which you can now buy!  There was also a very nice book on Design Patterns on Symbian OS released at the same time.

However, the very best thing at the show is meeting all the people that make these things happen and other like-minded developers.  I got to meet up with several of my fellow Forum Nokia Champions again, which is always a pleasure.  I also enjoyed getting to spend some time with Espen from Qt Software, who's leading the port of Qt to S60, Vinod, the technical architect of the P.I.P.S. team at Symbian and Lucian, one of the new Symbian Ambassadors (very much like a Symbian version of Forum Nokia Champion - although the first batch are all Symbian employees so I'm not sure how much use they'll get from the benefits of membership), plus many, many more - too numerous to mention.

It's really worth going to some of these events - you're bound to come away with plenty of new contacts and ideas.  Don't miss next year's Smartphone Show, whatever form it takes.

Mark