Symbian Foundation at MWC 2009

Mobile World Congress 2009 is almost upon us. The Symbian Foundation will have a stand with some fun demos (and free coffee!) so please pop by and say hello! They have also set up a Symbian Foundation Blog where they will be posting news and coverage from the show.

Please go visit it, bookmark it, subscribe to it and share it with the world!

Symbian SQL Demo

Here’s some more demo goodness for those who couldn’t see it in person at the MWC last week. One of the new features of Symbian OS version 9.3 is Symbian SQL. It’s designed to search through large (as in Terabyte large) amounts of data very quickly.

This can be used to speed up searches in large address books or calendars. It will also be invaluable in the realm of multimedia since people are carrying around ever more pictures, songs and videos on their phones. No doubt developers will find plenty of other ingenious uses for it too.

The team looking after this component in Symbian is called System Libraries (aka SysLibs) and they cooked up a neat little demo application that runs on S60 (They were showing it on a Nokia N95 8GB). It searches through a local copy of Wikipedia’s titles and abstracts (that’s 2.2. million entries taking up 1.4GB of storage). The search is instantly narrowed down as you begin typing something which demonstrates just how quick Symbian SQL can cut through all that data.

I’ve put together a series of screenshots as an animation to give you an idea of what this looks like when searching for “Symbian”:

Pretty impressive I’m sure you’ll agree!

The eagle-eyed amongst you may be thinking “Hang on a minute, if SQL server is in Symbian OS 9.3 how did you get the demo working on a 9.2-based device?” and you’d be quite right, the N95 8gig does not have SQL server out of the box. However, Symbian will begin offering the server as an installable SIS file for 9.2 devices soon (via SDN++ probably) and the demo was built using that!

The people behind the ScreenPlay demo

One of the demos at our Symbian stand this year was showing off ScreenPlay. It highlighted the benefits you get now that some of our Multimedia technologies such as the camera viewfinder and video playback have been integrated with ScreenPlay.

What visitors to our stand did not see is all the hard work that went into producing this demo. In this post I hope to shed a little light on how many people came together from all across our organisation to make this demo happen. This is not an exhaustive list of every single person who was somehow involved (for example, some preferred to remain anonymous), but pictured or not they all deserve a big pat on the back. I’m sure the same goes for those who worked on our other MWC demos too.

Graphics Team

These are the people who helped create ScreenPlay in the first place, so obviously the whole team deserves some credit. Some graduates and Deep (pictured below) within Graphics produced the originial demo used in the 2007 Smartphone Show which was the foundation of this new demo.

A number of people also provided lots of support during the development of the new demo. Especially Rehan and Simon. Cheers dudes!

A big thank you also to Rob for helping iron out some last minute bugs and John, their team lead, for allowing them the time to help out!

Base Team

Thanks to our man Vitaly, who provided support for the TV out driver, we were able to show off the demo on the big screen!

Of course, TV out is no good unless you have the right cables for it. Enter Angelo, the lord of the boards:

Marketing Team

The pretty icons used in the demo were produced by Annabel and Sabeena from the Marketing Department.

Multimedia Team

Integrating the camera viewfinder with ScreenPlay and providing lots of support was done by the camera guys in London: Rahul, Matthew, Brian, Jason & Hitesh.

Allowing video decoding to a graphics surface was done by our video gurus in Vancouver. Thanks to David for being the main contact for support:

And of course the demo was pieced together, continuously tweaked and presented by Joseph from the video team within Multimedia:

Last but not least, I had a small part bugging Joseph with UI ideas and suggestions and also being his side-kick at the MWC Symbian stand in Barcelona.

So there you have it, an excellent example of collaboration in Symbian. Can’t wait to see what we cook up for the next trade show!

Live photos

Here’s a bunch of live photos of some of the Symbian OS devices announced at the MWC. Enjoy!

Nokia N96

Nokia N78

Nokia 6220 Classic

Nokia 6210 Navigator

Samsung G810

Sony Ericsson G700

Sony Ercisson G900

Update: I’ve added full-size versions of these pictures and more on my Flickr account. Enjoy!

Thanks and good night

An exhausted stand staff and blogger toast the end of a very successful show. Well done everyone. Now please can i sleep?

Suite retreat

The sun has sadly abandoned us on this, the last day of the show. The hospitality suite offers a welcome respite from the rain.

LG KT-610

As promised, I’ve snapped a few piccies of LG’s new S60 handset. It’s a very unique design – on the outside it looks like a classy but retro handset with just basic buttons and a small display…

…however open it up and you have a mini communicator! Full QWERTY keyboard, landscape screen and stereo speakers! Pretty nifty!

Btw, it seems there was a typo in the press release and it’s main screen is the usual QVGA resolution, not VGA.

Getting ready for tomorrow…

The Symbian stand is up. The cube is lit and rotating. The jelly bean dispenser has been filled…

…The coffee machine is present. The lip balm is ready…

I think we’re ready to go!

If you’re attending the Mobile World Congress, please come by and say hi! We’re in Hall 8, stand 8A77 (Check the MWC’s floorplans for directions if you get lost). You can see our latest tech demos, find out about Symbian OS’s cool features and of course grab a free coffee and have a chat with us. We look forward to seeing you all!

Stand and deliver

A sunny barcelona greets us as we hit the stand to see how construction is proceeding. The fira is seething with activity and mega structures are flying up in record time. 48 hours until the doors open. The clock is ticking.