Comments on: David Wood from Symbian Responds to Ovi Store Post http://www.exponere.com/2009/david-wood-from-symbian-responds-to-ovi-store-post/ sharing stuff that @barneyc finds interesting Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:34:59 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Duncan Cragg http://www.exponere.com/2009/david-wood-from-symbian-responds-to-ovi-store-post/comment-page-1/#comment-28 Duncan Cragg Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:25:41 +0000 http://www.exponere.com/2009/david-wood-from-symbian-responds-to-ovi-store-post/#comment-28 Windows Mobile is the (only?) other OS with this potential problem: traditionally more used by office-bound or techie types. If my (rather miserable) experience with Wince on the Xperia is anything to go by, no amount of community discussion will help track down the instability that builds up as you add and run many applications. The apps may have bad behaviour encoded into them, but the underlying OS has to protect itself, and other apps. Even good programmers make these mistakes when coding close to the metal - rather than insulated by a VM. I'm sure Symbian is a better architected OS than Wince, and getting better, but I'd say fixing (a) the resilience of the OS, using Linux as the standard, and (b) the programmability of Symbian/S60, again using Linux as the standard, are two big priorities for the Symbian Foundation. Both of these will go a long way to boosting multi-app stability in the user experience. David Wood assures us that Symbian Signed, at least, will get much better, which may help: <a href="http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2009/03/interview-with-david-wood-catalyst-at-symbian-foundation.html" target="_blank">http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2009/03/inter...</a> Also, this article: <a href="http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3331" target="_blank">http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3331</a> suggests a bias in the Ovi Store towards Webbish technologies, which would hopefully bypass this issue anyway. And leave the native Symbian appstoring problems for Symbian Foundation (and I suppose O2 Litmus) to sort out .. =0) Duncan Cragg Windows Mobile is the (only?) other OS with this potential problem: traditionally more used by office-bound or techie types.

If my (rather miserable) experience with Wince on the Xperia is anything to go by, no amount of community discussion will help track down the instability that builds up as you add and run many applications. The apps may have bad behaviour encoded into them, but the underlying OS has to protect itself, and other apps. Even good programmers make these mistakes when coding close to the metal – rather than insulated by a VM.

I'm sure Symbian is a better architected OS than Wince, and getting better, but I'd say fixing (a) the resilience of the OS, using Linux as the standard, and (b) the programmability of Symbian/S60, again using Linux as the standard, are two big priorities for the Symbian Foundation. Both of these will go a long way to boosting multi-app stability in the user experience.

David Wood assures us that Symbian Signed, at least, will get much better, which may help:
http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2009/03/inter...

Also, this article: http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3331 suggests a bias in the Ovi Store towards Webbish technologies, which would hopefully bypass this issue anyway.

And leave the native Symbian appstoring problems for Symbian Foundation (and I suppose O2 Litmus) to sort out .. =0)

Duncan Cragg

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