Comments on: Symbian, a mobile OS, gets a heart http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/2009/04/symbian-a-mobile-os-gets-a-heart/ A wide-ranging discussion of important business-related matters, such as innovation, risk, understanding customers and managing groups Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:10:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Customers Are Talking » Blog Archive » “Story banks” for dispersed collaborative communities http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/2009/04/symbian-a-mobile-os-gets-a-heart/comment-page-1/#comment-681 Customers Are Talking » Blog Archive » “Story banks” for dispersed collaborative communities Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:49:15 +0000 http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/?p=1095#comment-681 [...] in part due to spending time with the New Tech Meetup of Central PA and meeting the folks from Symbian at CTIA, I’ve been thinking that story banks are a powerful tool that distributed development [...] [...] in part due to spending time with the New Tech Meetup of Central PA and meeting the folks from Symbian at CTIA, I’ve been thinking that story banks are a powerful tool that distributed development [...]

]]> By: Jason Lackey http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/2009/04/symbian-a-mobile-os-gets-a-heart/comment-page-1/#comment-636 Jason Lackey Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:04:12 +0000 http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/?p=1095#comment-636 Hi John - let me just say that calling Symbian the smartphone underdog is perhaps akin to calling Microsoft the desktop OS underdog and Google the up and coming search provider. These guys have about half the smartphone market depending on how you define smartphone and run on some of the very best hardware there is. While many phones have an ephemeral, almost cheap feel, like they will be thrown out in a couple months, phones like the E71x, recently introduced by AT&T, are built like tanks. Hold one and thoughts of the cuddly underdog vanish.<br><br>Speaking of the E71x - fine phone, built to last and made for the long run. Fair disclosure, I work for InnoPath, a company that builds mobile customer care solutions. While we did not make the device management client on the E71, it is a damn fine client on that Symbian device. The cool thing about that and many other Symbian phones is that they come from the factory with OMA-DM over the air management capability built in. This means that folks like AT&T and others will be able to deploy servers in their call centers that will allow them to remotely manage, meaning both diagnose and fix, these phones over the air. Oh, new firmware update? Well, with uberdogs like the iPhone you need to do a 300 meg download on your PC, install iTunes and then use that to install the ROM. With FOTA capable devices, well, just download the FOTA package (much more like a patch in size than a full system image) and do the update - all over the air. No fuss, no muss, no bother.<br><br>Yeah, these guys are good. The cutsey logo and stuff has inspired lots of discussion and helps encourage thoughts of warmth and compassion etc, but these guys are top tier players at the height of their game with a commanding market share. I suspect that both Nokia and Symbian will find greater acceptance in North America in days to come and I further suspect that the manageablility of symbian devices will be part of the cause of their success. Hi John – let me just say that calling Symbian the smartphone underdog is perhaps akin to calling Microsoft the desktop OS underdog and Google the up and coming search provider. These guys have about half the smartphone market depending on how you define smartphone and run on some of the very best hardware there is. While many phones have an ephemeral, almost cheap feel, like they will be thrown out in a couple months, phones like the E71x, recently introduced by AT&T, are built like tanks. Hold one and thoughts of the cuddly underdog vanish.

Speaking of the E71x – fine phone, built to last and made for the long run. Fair disclosure, I work for InnoPath, a company that builds mobile customer care solutions. While we did not make the device management client on the E71, it is a damn fine client on that Symbian device. The cool thing about that and many other Symbian phones is that they come from the factory with OMA-DM over the air management capability built in. This means that folks like AT&T and others will be able to deploy servers in their call centers that will allow them to remotely manage, meaning both diagnose and fix, these phones over the air. Oh, new firmware update? Well, with uberdogs like the iPhone you need to do a 300 meg download on your PC, install iTunes and then use that to install the ROM. With FOTA capable devices, well, just download the FOTA package (much more like a patch in size than a full system image) and do the update – all over the air. No fuss, no muss, no bother.

Yeah, these guys are good. The cutsey logo and stuff has inspired lots of discussion and helps encourage thoughts of warmth and compassion etc, but these guys are top tier players at the height of their game with a commanding market share. I suspect that both Nokia and Symbian will find greater acceptance in North America in days to come and I further suspect that the manageablility of symbian devices will be part of the cause of their success.

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