While the Symbian Expo may be quite a modest by some standards what it may lack in size it certainly makes up for in enthusiasm. The buzz at this years show was intense although it tempered by the knowledge that Symbian OS devices still make up a small percentage of mobile phone shipments. David Levin, Symbian’s CEO, also highlighted that Symbian OS devices also fall short of the total market they could reach based on the volume of phones where the bill of materials could justify use of Symbian OS.

Several announcements at the show signal a sea change in the Symbian OS device market. The announcement by Arima of the U300 is a good illustration of this change. Unlike current Symbian OS devices, which, at best are a standard package with an operator logo on then, Arima is taking a fully ODM/JDM approach with a modular design allowing it to create highly individual devices for operator partners. The device in its vanilla form is certainly impressive, 20% lighter and smaller than a P910, with a larger, full QVGA screen and built in Morphum and Fathammer games engines. So not only does it create a new benchmark in device functionality it also create significant new competition for the existing brand manufacturers. Arima expect U300 based devices to be shipping by Q1 next year.

In a similar vein the announcement of a new device reference design based around the Intel chipset signals a significant shift by Intel given its earlier support for Microsoft. The platform, which provides something in the region of 60 to 70% of a full product, allows companies with “phone vision,” as David Levin described it, to complete the package, and create devices that offer diversity within a common framework.

Two key items rounding out the device related news are that Symbian is investing further in UIQ to ensure version 3, which includes a one-hand option which utilizing the same application code base as the pen based version, will be ready for market early next year. Coupled with this the confirmation that UIQ and Series 60 were working more closely to ensure a higher level of code compatibility between the two platform is good news for third party developers.

There was also several other announcements which is significantly assist developer in the creation of quality applications. These concern what can loosely be described as quality tools. As you may have seen on the show blog, another vendor is poised to offer a testing tool. STS’s tool is similar in basic test functionality to the Mercury/mTest Solution but its not yet a commercial product however looked quite complete. Breaking new ground for Symbian OS developers is Mobile Innovation's CodeScanner. This tool examines C++ code for potential coding problems. Mobile Innovation’s have been using the tool internally for its own work, as well as to QA third parties code, where CodeScanner has been detecting up to 50 potentially problematic line of code in every thousand for a number of projects Mobile Innovation’s clients believed to be almost complete. One of the real strengths of CodeScanner is its proactive approach, allowing potential problems to be identified before the expensive exercise of full testing is started. Also, unlike Mobile Innovation’s TRY product, Code Scanner has a low unit price (in the region of $400 US) which makes it accessible to a wide range of developers. One final tool worth a mention is the updated version of Digia’s Quality Kit, which, compared to the version this writer saw some two years ago, is now a very complete product with both functional and unit test capabilities, and a test management interface. Interestingly Digia are also talking about providing some form of integration with Rational's test products. We hope to bring you reviews of these products in the near future.

Elsewhere in the show content delivery systems were clearly one of the “now” tools with several new products. We have mentioned both Silk and Magpie in our event previews but were also impressed with a technology from Atop Innovation which allows streaming video for existing broadcast media to be delivered over GPRS to Symbian OS devices. This is an area we will be concentrating on tomorrow, along with enterprise, so expect more in tomorrow’s show report.

This years show is certainly suggesting that Symbian OS is reaching a level of maturity, with multiple vendors offering tools in key areas from application development through to user content and applications delivery. The show has much to offer of interest and two days hardly seems enough time to fully explore all the products and services being presented – but we will be working hard to get round as many as possible tomorrow and reporting back in our second show report.