Ron Schaeffer is Head of Product Strategy and Planning at Sendo, his group is responsible for defining Sendo’s global product plans, specifying individual product and then driving them through development to market. We caught up with Ron recently between flights at Amsterdam Airport.


Richard: Ron, thanks for talking with SymbianOne, I’d like to kick off by asking about the time it has taken to develop the Sendo X, Sendo seem to have managed better than several major manufactures who are also working with Symbian OS. Why do you think you have been able to do that?
Ron: Firstly I would like to be a little cautious in that we have not actually started shipping the Sendo X. We still need to do some work before it ships but we have announced it and it is in testing with operators and on schedule.
I think to understand how we have achieved this we need to go back to November last year after we’d terminated our agreement with Microsoft. We started the Sendo X after that. To start with we spent a few weeks pouring through specifications and we looked in particular at what operators and customers were telling us about their likes and dislikes. We then started real development on the phone in early December 2002.
I think our team was highly motivated but also we got involved with Symbian OS and Series 60 when it had been around for long enough to mean that the issues we ended up dealing with were integration and adaptation issues specific to our platform. We were not uncovering generic issues in the Symbian OS or Series 60 software and perhaps being involved at this stage make thing easier than it had been for some of the other licensees.

Richard: What features did the feedback on the Z100 bring to the Sendo X?
Ron: Several, from a consumer perspective we start with a phone with a higher specification than those currently on the market, something which makes it stand out. Then the things we have added on top of Series 60 include an MP3 player, extra functionality in the camera, such as the flash, and a camcorder. We also have a pretty cool voice recognition facility in the Sendo X that goes far beyond the normal voice recognition in phones. Normally you would have to record a voice tag for each contact or action and then have to remember whether the person you want to phone is one of the 10 voice tags you have out of the 500 numbers in your phone book. Sendo X has speaker independent voice recognition that effectively creates voice tags for your entire address book and actions list so from day one you press a button and ask the Sendo X to dial John Smith and without you having trained the phone it will find and dial John Smith from your phone book.
On the operators side the main thing we have done is create facilities to allow for what we believe a greatly increased level of customization when compared to other phones. As you may be aware customization is a key part of Sendo’s business model and there is a significant push from operators demanding more customization. So we have extended the features of Series 60 by allowing URLs or Java MIDLets to be embedded into the Series 60 menu, so the user no longer has to search for MIDLets in their own little folder, they are just there on the menu. We can also change all of the graphics, colors and sounds within the phone as well as add wallpaper themes.
Beyond these changes our major new customization is the Now screen which is a replacement for the standard phone screen in Series 60. The main purpose of the Now screen is to provide quick access to the services provided by a network operator. It’s built on an extensible plug-in architecture so operators can add URLs, applications or MIDLets to the screen, effectively making them a feature of the phone. So for example Vodafone Live! or T-Zones icon can be right in front of the phone user every time they use the phone. In addition programs could be written to do just about anything. An operator might extended their service by taking information from an MMS subscription service, that for example sends customers football scores with pictures of the goals being scored, the plug-in could grab the information out of the MMS and display it immediately on the Now screen and perhaps including a link to more information. So it is all about driving the use of network operators’ services. So the consumer benefits from being able to get the most from operator services but the Now screen also gives them quick access to PIM information and while the operators service information is set the user can customize elements of the Now screen themselves to make it truly personal.

Richard: Series 60 also provides licensees with other options in terms of extending the platform such as their own APIs. In addition to the Now screen have you added any other features of interest to developers?
Ron: Firstly the Sendo X is a Series 60 phone and will be able to run applications designed and built for generic Series 60. We are not immediately going to add APIs, we will be releasing the APIs and SDK for the plug-in architecture of the Now screen so that 3rd Party developers can write plug-ins. These plug-ins they may sell directly to the consumers, via an operator or they may be able to sell them directly to us.
Developers should also look at the general performance of the phone which could have advantages for certain types of applications. For example we have a graphics co-processor, the GraphiX, that does all the drawing and interfaces with the camera and display, so there is some graphics acceleration but it also frees the ARM processor up to run Series 60 and applications. So developers should see much better application performance on the Sendo X.
Similarly the sound capabilities include a high quality speaker with a specially designed acoustic chamber in the phone as well as stereo audio with headphones, which again developers may be able to exploit in applications.

Richard: What sort of timeframe are you working to for releasing the Now screen APIs?
Ron: We are planning to make them available in the first quarter of 2004; I’m hoping it will be earlier rather than later. But our first goal is to bed down the standard plug-ins that are going out to our launch customers, confirming they are as stable as our testing suggests, and then once we have confirmed that, and the security mechanisms, then we will release the SDK.

Richard: When you launched your developer site for what is now the Sendo X you called for “killer apps”, did that challenge find anything?
Ron: Yes it did, we have 3 or maybe 4 third party features we have incorporated into the phone, but they won’t really look like stand alone applications, rather they will be part of the differentiation we have added to Series 60. We expect to be able to announce some more about those applications shortly.
Richard: So overall what is Sendo’s message to developer who are looking to work with the Sendo X?
Ron: I think the main message to developers is that this phone is fundamentally Series 60 and we believe it is important that developers write applications that will run on all Series 60 phones. So when an owner visits Handango they can go to the Series 60 page and select an application to add to the Sendo X without having to worry about the phone for which the application is intended. That’s not to say developers should not exploit the unique features of the Sendo X, there is the ability to check the device IDs and adapt the application to different phones.
The other thing we want to ensure is that we are strongly supporting the developer community. We had positive feedback from the Z100 Smartphone program, and we expect to provide a better standard of tools, white papers, sample code and SDK for the Sendo X.


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