Content delivery was one particularly active area of the show this year. Several companies were showing new solutions designed to help operators build data usage by delivery content to handsets. This area is perhaps one of the most innovation in the Symbian space as, despite sharing the same goal, a wide range of different implementations were on display, although three basic approaches seem to be emerging.

Given Magpie Technology’s heritage as a concept originally floated by Symbian back in 2002 it is unsurprising that it takes the most integrated approach to content delivery. Magpie allows users to display content “snacks” almost anywhere within the application running on a Symbian OS phone. This ability includes third party applications as the technology includes a set of APIs allowing third party developers to Magpie enable their applications. One of the powerful features of Magpie is that the user is able to select which content services are displayed in which applications, so, for example, news or stock prices can be delivered to the main menu, while the weather may only show in the calendar. The system is currently running with an operator in South Africa delivery sports and stock price information.

While Magpie is fully integrated with a platform’s UI, Silk takes a more application like approach, delivering a new menu option which provides the content portal. The concept behind Silk grew out of work done by Clear, Silk’s developer, to delivery an on device help guide for Macromedia and it will be interesting to see whether these targeted proprietary solution gain much traction against Macromedia’s de-facto standard.

The final broad class of content tools are one which also cross over into the UI domain. Trigenix was one of the early player in this market and have been joined more recently by Infocube. Infocube takes an interesting approach with an interface that consists of 3D cube components the user navigates by swiping to rotate and then selecting faces to access specific content. Billed very much as a 21st century interface (as opposed to the simple list and icon based interfaces which have been around for many years) it certainly has a novelty value but whether this style of approach can translate into long term usability is unclear.

One of the key features of Magpie, Silk and Infocube is that they deliver information in a way which overcomes the latency of 2.5G environments, which even with the uptake of 3G are likely to be part of most operators portfolios for a number of year, by preloading content. Latency is the biggest constraint on today’s on-demand web content. Users of the Opera browser will have encountered this problem, with often frustratingly slow page rendering. While 2.5G networks have a reasonable pipe for delivering data there is often a latency period between a data request and the response. As a result a typical html page is loaded by a sequence which starts with the HTML download, then a pause, then the first image, another pause, the second image and so on. Bytemobile are a company addressing this problem by using a client server architecture which caches page details on an operator hosted server and then, through a combination of data compression and protocol optimization, delivers the content in a single burst to the device. The demonstrations at the show were certainly impressive, displaying pages within Opera somewhere between three and six times faster than a standard GPRS connection.

While transient browser style content has little inherent risk of pirating many classes of content, such as ringtones, device theme and other reusable media rely on the single owner concept to be economic. As a result DRM is a key issue for both content owners and operators. Protecting content is problematic, particularly when the user has an open handset capable of loading any application. Software based encryption applications are vulnerable as the hacking industry will almost inevitably find ways to circumvent protection mechanism based in software. Discretix is one company looking to address this problem with hardware based encryption systems, which present a exponentially greater challenge to circumvent. Discretix’s technology is likely to become an integral part of Symbian OS devices in the future giving content owners significantly greater comfort and assurance that protect content is in fact protected.

There will be a further show report tomorrow.