While no one element of the show leave you breathless there is a very clear sense that the Symbian ecosystem is developing as the runaway snowball; growing ever larger as it rolls on, gathering partners as it picks up speed.

Nigel Clifford kicked off the smartphone show with a prediction that the smartphone is poised to take over from the PC. Soon much of the world's population will get online, get connected, get informed, and get entertained, via a smartphone. The powerhouse behind this change is not just the rapidly expanding smartphone culture in Europe, but from what Nigel Clifford described as the leapfrog economies of the underdeveloped world; where the smartphone is most likely to the way most people gain their first experience of the Internet. Even the US may start playing a role as interest in Symbian there has increased dramatically, according to Nigel.

Although Symbian has become a louder voice over the last couple of years, it is still understated in a way which is uniquely British. At the shows main press conference Nigel was given ample opportunity to offer negative views on Symbian's competition or some of he initiatives within the smartphone world. Universally Nigel responded with answers that boiled down to: let the competition do it their way, our success speaks for itself or I really have no opinion on whether its good or bad, all I know is Symbian provides the technology to allow the market to decide. Understated or arrogant, it's a thin line, but in many ways a differentiation that hardly matters.

Before I talk a little more about the show, let's go back to the night before and the Sony Ericsson pub event. This event gave the strongest indication that Sony Ericsson remains firmly committed to UIQ and has real plans to significantly expanding its range of UIQ phones further. Sony Ericsson clearly recognizes that the launch of its first UIQ 3 devices has not been a smooth one for developer, and hopes to have learnt from these mistakes. The imperative now is to regain the momentum that existed around the earlier P series devices and build the catalog of UIQ application ready for the new phones in 2007. (A full report will follow.)

While it has not made headlines, possibly the most encouraging news for developers came from some of the statistics Handango shared with us. Despite the fact that Sony Ericsson has moved its branded shop supplier to Motricity, Handango is already seeing the P990 start to climb the list of devices whose users are buying the most software. Even more encouragingly the sales of software for S60 devices have also shown dramatic growth since the shipments of the Nseries and Eseries devices commenced.

Complimenting this increased demand are expanding opportunities for developers who are not within the Java or C++ communities. redFivelabs from South Africa, are in the final stages of beta testing a technology which will allow .NET compact framework developers to run their application on S60 devices without change. While this technology is currently running on pre Symbian OS v9 Dusan Babich, redFIVElabs CEO, indicated an OS v9.x version was likely to be available with commercial launch of the product and a UIQ version is not far behind. Following on from the announcement of AppForge support for v9 the opportunities for developers from the Microsoft world to take advantage Symbian is continuing to grow.

Another cold weather analogy. The Smartphone Show is like an iceberg; from the outside nine tenths of it is hidden. It is not useful to judge it by the number or breadth of exhibitors. While some companies that have exhibited in the past are no longer present at a stand, they are still here, walking the floor and scurrying off into one of the many meeting rooms around the event. Nine tenths of the real activity at this show is also hidden!

Day one of the show left the very clear impression that the Symbian ecosystem is so much more than the sum of its parts; more about some of those parts tomorrow.