Nokia touts concepts, not tech at S60 summit: OS centers on reach, innovation and user experience

BARCELONA, Spain – Nokia Corp. used its S60 Summit ’08 to tout the reach of its smartphone platform, woo low-profile developers and – like just about everybody else in mobile – crow about its openness.
The show opened with a flashy video that demonstrated Series 60’s capabilities not just on Nokia devices but also on handsets from LG Electronics Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (highlighting openness), and the manufacturer consistently pointed to the 75 device models and 150 million-plus handsets that run the platform. Matti Vanska – Nokia’s VP of mobile software sales and marketing, who doubled as event chair – used his opening remarks to rally the several hundred developers in attendance, many of whom represented startups looking for a hit application.
“It’s very difficult to predict where the next big innovation is coming from,” Vanska said. While it could be a big-name developer with a huge budget, “it could be the kid next door.”
These are restless days for Symbian, the OS upon which S60 is built. (S60 accounts for roughly three-quarters of all Symbian devices.) Shipment numbers were mixed during the latest quarter, with the platform suffering a 21% drop from the prior quarter but a 16.5% improvement year-over-year. And a drop in average royalty per unit left income at a static – but still impressive – $75 million.
But Symbian claimed a dominating 67% of the worldwide smartphone market last year, according to Canalys, and was “a clear leader” in key emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The OS also enjoys a tremendous following among third-party developers, who’ve released more than 9,200 “official” Symbian applications – not including shareware and offerings from garage developers.
Nokia owns roughly 48% of Symbian – the balance is held by Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung – and hopes to build on that success with a host of new initiatives: it has already put components of the S60 platform into the open process, and plans to further its open source efforts by integrating technology from Trolltech once its acquisition of the Norwegian firm is complete.
Interestingly, though, talk at the S60 Summit centered as much around concepts like reach, innovation and the user experience (indeed, those were Vanska’s key topics) as they were about specific technologies.
“The operating system and lower software layers are still key, but no longer offer differentiation,” said Heikki Norta, Nokia’s SVP of corporate strategy. “The value is shifting from hardware and operating systems to services and applications. . We believe the next wave of mobile development is going to be a lot more solution-centric than the latest one.”
And speaker after speaker parroted Norta’s theme of practicality over technology, urging developers to make simplicity a priority.
“It’s less important what the development is, and more important what you can do with it,” said Ukko Lappalainen, VP of Nokia’s Nseries markets. “I’ll be the first to admit that we haven’t done a lot of things well. Our original music approach was not successful, and our video (effort) was not a huge success. But today, in 2008, things work. . I think the software experience is getting more usable; consumers are getting educated.”