Gabor Torok's Forum Nokia Blog

Mobile Monday Budapest - Great success!

2009-02-24T16:35:49+01:00

We held the second Mobile Monday Budapest event yesterday evening. As I already wrote, the topic was mobile software development: Android and Symbian in particular. My colleague gave a great presentation on Android and I talked about Symbian. Unfortunately, the third presenter was not able to come, thus we didn't have a presentation about iPhone development. Nevertheless, we still tried to cover as wide range of platforms during the free Q&A session as possible.

There were something like 50 engineering-minded people (like us:), brave enough to ask smart questions, eager to learn from the others (not only from presenters) and willing to network. The event was sponsored by Forum Nokia (event site is available at bantora.com) and my employer, Agil Eight. Thanks for both!

I'm so happy that this habit slowly becomes a tradition - it's exactly this what we need in our small country. Looking forward to the upcoming MoMo Budapest even in April!

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Mobile Monday Budapest - Mobile Software Development

2009-02-16T22:36:42+01:00

It's time for the 2^nd Mobile Monday Budapest event! This time the topic is mobile software development and we selected the three hottest platforms: iPhone, Android and Symbian. I wrote 'we', because I'm among the organizers as well as one of the presenters: my presentation will cover Symbian-based development.

Some information on the event:

Date: Feb 23, 2009

Time: 18:00 - 21:00

Venue: BUTE, Magyar Tudósok Körútja 2, Room 019

For more information, please refer to Nokia's new web service, Bantora, or Mobile Monday Hungary.

Everybody is welcome!

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mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com

The diversity of Symbian development

2008-12-06T23:49:35+01:00

When talking about mobile software development lots of people forget about the fact that it's not only the native programming language that can be used on a given platform. I've read a lot of comparisons between Symbian/C++, Win32/MFC/.NET of Windows Mobile, Objective-C on iPhone, Android, etc. lately discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these options, maturity and popularity of the underlying platforms, probability of writing successful programs, etc.

The problem with these comparisons (in which Symbian/C++ is typically at the end of the list with its peculiarities and steep learning curve) is that they discuss only half of the picture. The more advanced a mobile platform the more you can do on it - which applies to software development, too. I strongly believe that one of the strengths of software development on Symbian platform is that it's not bound to a single programming language, SDK, etc. A lot of you might not know that for Symbian-powered devices you can write software in

Java - Mobile Java (JME) has been available since the early days,
Flash Lite - Adobe's Flash has been added to S60 phones 1-2 years ago,
Python - Python for S60 is an open source initiative enabling rapid application development,
Ruby - Ruby for Symbian is one of the newest additions to S60,
.NET - Red Five Labs's add-on to S60 platform is tempting Windows Mobile developers to use their skills on another platform,
NS Basic - Powerful development environment and run-time framework for programs written in BASIC (link),
HTML using other web technologies like CSS, Javascript - Apple's WebKit rendering engine is becoming the de facto standard for mobile browsers making them capable of showing full web pages (i.e. not only WAP or mobile web). This enables widgets development for a range of smartphones like S60-phones, iPhone, Android, etc.

You can see from the list above that Symbian development is much more than native application programming. On the contrary, I dare to claim that native programming is becoming less and less relevant over time. Of course, each option has its strengths and weaknesses (as well as native programming) the point is diversity, the possibility to choose. This (among others) makes Symbian OS's position stronger than its competitors': if you can develop for one mobile platform it's almost sure that you can use THAT knowledge for Symbian development, too. One exception for this might be Objective-C on iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised if that became a reality on Symbian in the near future, too.

By the way, Simon Judge made a quick comparison between different platform development options - it's worth a read. As well as Andreas Constantinou's post at Vision Mobile - a well-written article about mobile application runtimes for better understanding this world.

Any comments are welcome,

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mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com

Mobile Monday in Hungary

2008-11-25T16:14:29+01:00

I don't know if you've ever heard of the event, Mobile Monday, but if you visit their site you can see that it's a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets.

Now it has finally arrived to Budapest, Hungary! I attended the very first event last evening and I was surprised to see how many people are involved and interested in mobility in this small country! It wasn't a very long event and there were only two presentations, but hey, it's the first one, right?

Actually I was interested in Torsti Tenhunen's presentation (Mobile Media – connecting and consuming everywhere) and was also wondering how many people have ever heard of Ovi, for example. Not too much as I could see in the audience. There was a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and since the audience didn't dare to ask anything (including me ... sigh), some people were randomly picked up to ask questions. I was picked up, too, and managed to ask a tough question. At least, even the presenter admitted that it was tough.

What was my question? Well, relating to Ovi I always wondered what Nokia's view on entering a competition with such big names as Apple and Google who have already proven in (web) services. My question was something like "How does Nokia intend to compete with those popular services that people have already got used to (iTunes and Google's bunch of services) and in general how do they see their position in the newdevices + services setup where manufacturers are rolling out their own services, too"? Well, I admit that it's not a question that's easy to answer. As I mentioned even the presenter admitted that. Of course. I like to ask tough questions. Anyone can ask easy questions, but not so many people can point out things that are behind a presentation. This was the first fullpresentation that I saw about Ovi (of course, I had already known a lot of things about it beforehand) and although it was a new concept to most people I wanted to know more.

To be honest, my question was only partially answered. Some marketing hype was included in the answer (we're good at services, people will buy the idea, because they're gonna be very good, we have our brand name, etc.) in addition to pointing out the fact that Nokia has nice programs for emerging markets (think of Nokia Life Tools). This argument is valid, indeed, I've even already discussed about it lately. On the other hand, my addition to this list would have been something like:

the coverage of offerings these companies offer (including Nokia) varies and that gives users the freedom to pick up their choice of service provider,
Nokia plans to set up its own MVNO in Japan (read about the consequences and how it's supposed to affect e.g. Ovi here).

Anyway, I'm happy to attend upcoming MoMo events in Budapest in the hope of stiring up the "local" water. With unpleasant questions if necessary. :)

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mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com