Symbian CEO on open source, Windows Mobile and 'usability'

The Foundation will consist of a board of 10 people - drawn from the founder members (AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Vodafone) - as well as an overall leader (yet to be appointed). It will also have a number of "sub-groups", which Clifford says will be "looking at features and architecture to make sure it's consistent; looking at roadmap; and looking at UI [user interface] development".

While founder members will have developers delivering code into the Foundation - including initially and most obviously the keystones of the Symbian OS: user interfaces S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) - they won't be able to dictate how code is used. "Ultimately what comes into the Foundation - what it can offer - will depend on the community, so it's a very different model from a standards body or a code repository," explains Clifford.

Road to open source
Symbian's road to an open source future began in October/November last year, according to Clifford, after the company's annual strategy round. "There were probably half a dozen of us in the strategy team and the leadership team who were beginning to think a lot about what's the future of competition in this marketplace, what do we need to do to be able to compete effectively, how do we take this to the next stage, how do we engage more actively with more developers across the world, how do we free up that 200 million devices for experimentation - all of that," he says.

"And coincidentally we bumped into other people coming from other companies who were thinking about these same kinds of things. And through a series of conversations that got developed and developed and then ultimately in June we got to the point where the 10 board members were in agreement and we could make the announcement on the 24th. So it wasn't the planning of five years but it wasn't the planning of five days either. It was kind of neatly in between."

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Asked whether the Foundation is inadvertently giving a window of opportunity to rivals such as Google by only committing to make its code available to developers "over the next two years", Clifford says developers can, in practice get their hands on it now.

"At the moment we are shipping tens of millions of devices which are effectively using Foundation code because we are providing Symbian OS and S60 is being put on top or UIQ or MOAP and for the last three years we've had a very strict compatibility promise - precisely for the developers."

He adds: "We do maintain very strict compatibility. So if you're a developer and you want to develop for the Foundation then you can do it today. People are doing it today. And if you develop something for Symbian 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 then it will still work when you get to the Foundation 'code' as that is made complete and then released as a complete package over the next couple of years."

Sizing up the rivals
While the company has clearly come to a decision about the merits of an open source business model, Clifford is dismissive of mobile Linux efforts, such as the rival LiMo Foundation. "In terms of mobile Linux I'd rather be where I am than anywhere near mobile Linux," he says. "If you look at the fragmentation, if you look at the amount of time it's taken anyone to produce anything usable with mobile Linux and the expense that they've gone to to do that… "

When it comes to Windows Mobile, Clifford believes its recent successes - in growing market share, at least - have been confined to niche areas, especially what he describes as "enterprise US", adding: "If you look more broadly at where they're active it's far more patchy and it's not yet apparent that it's broken through into the consumer world in that fashion."

And asked for his view on the iPhone, the Symbian chief also reaches for the word 'niche': "I think it's been an interesting example of what a single focused company can do with a single focused product. And that's interesting but it's like saying 'well Bentley have produced a fantastic car, why aren't all cars like Bentleys?'. Well some manufacturers manage an entire portfolio and that's for different consumers wanting different things at different times with different price points.

"I'm sure there will be niche products forever, there will always be niche products. Always have been, there always will be. But what we're about is providing the biggest possible opportunity to manufacturers and to developers."

Usability
So how does a mobile OS company go about building 'usability' into its wares - something Apple's iPhone has of course been lauded for - and is this even something an OS company needs to worry about?

"At an OS level, one could take the view that we don't really interact with the consumer it's not really anything to do with us. We'll let the UI guys worry about that or the web kit guys or whatever but that isn't true," says Clifford. "We can have a profound effect on how the customer perceives this. So we do a lot of work around constraints. What we want is a constraint-free environment for those UIs and those application guys to play in."

He adds: "There is now a very clear call to action around engaging the consumer and making it not just a transaction but actually an experience. And a lot of people are now talking about that as being the end goal - actually enjoying interacting with the device."

Constraints that can limit the enjoyment of a mobile user include areas such as power, memory and data throughput, says Clifford - all areas Symbian has been working to improve.

In the area of processing power and battery life the company is putting symmetric multiprocessing into mobiles. "[This] means that you'll get far more of a graduated use of power and processing inside the device," Clifford explains. "It's never been on [mobile] devices so we are now putting this into our versions which will begin to hit the market over the next 18 months."

He adds: "The demand for battery power is rising probably one, two, three times faster than the capacity. So [battery life] is a lot about how smart can you be, rather than just more power because that is not going to happen unless you start carrying very bulky products around."

When it comes to memory, he says Symbian has just put SQL Lite onto devices so "you can carry around the whole of Wikipedia on your device if you want to", adding: "Let's not constrain people through memory."

And on data throughput Clifford says the company is looking towards 4G, LTE and WiMax, and has also rearchitected its IP stack (now called 'FreeWay'). The CEO also points to Symbian's efforts - via its ScreenPlay tech - to improve the graphical experience for users and ensure UI effects are more easily integrated.

The point of all these tech investments, says Clifford, is to "get the OS out the way". "You do not want people sitting there waiting for the OS to do something. That's really the job of the OS - to be the traffic cop, directing all this stuff and not getting in the way."

But there are two sides to the usability coin - and Clifford stresses the importance of focusing on what the user wants and also thinking about market requirements.

He says: "We've always had a technical committee - so we've always met with our users on a regular basis. And we've also introduced a thing called market requirements [to ask what are the] market issues that we're solving here[?]… [to] make sure that we're all clear about this is where we're going, this is how we're doing it… Getting our engineering teams working very closely with our product management teams who are working very closely with our users is also one way of just making sure that the user experience and that usability is kept to the forefront."

What's to come
Looking ahead, Clifford believes developments in mobile screen technology could be a key development over the next few years: "One of the [mobile] technology frontiers of the next three to four years is the whole screen and display characteristics and you could anticipate having miniature displays or miniature projectors which could begin to break out of the whole constrained screen size so [a mobile could have] a mini projector which means all I need to do is tip it up and all of a sudden I've got all of my photos [displayed full size]."

Asked which is the best mobile app he's seen, the Symbian chief reveals his sporty side: "I've just done a triathlon with my two boys [who are aged 17 and 15] and beat them… And I was talking to one of the Symbian guys - he is a very keen oarsman, a rower, and sportsman - and he was showing me this [sports trainer] app [which incorporates GPS]… You just click it on and it tells you how long you've been running for, what sort of terrain you've been running over, how many calories you've burned. Download it, get to play with it on your PC, share it with your friends. All of that stuff.

"And I think it's really nice. It's just one of those things where it is integrated with your life and it's not about running your life but it's about you being able to run your life better."

Whether the Symbian Foundation - and the open source community who will contribute to it - will do a better job of integrating Symbian's various OSes into one unified platform and managing the millions of lines of code remains to be seen.