Support for mobile apps widens

Mobile applications are a tricky area for businesses because of the variety of device formats and platforms available. Symbian, however, believes its platform offers developers the broadest support in both business and consumer spheres.

Speaking at a roundtable event in London, Symbian director of developer programmes Bruce Carney said the platform not only supports native executables, but Posix-compliant code, Flash applications and Java. "There are a lot of developers interested in getting started on Symbian," Carney said.

Yet in the business world, Microsoftís Windows Mobile platform is often seen as more desirable, in part because the developer tools used to build PC applications can also target Microsoft-based handsets.

"There's an unwritten law that Windows Mobile is for business and Symbian is for consumers," said Ovum analyst Tony Cripps.

Another factor is that much enterprise software comes from the US, where awareness of Symbian is low, which influences the choice of European firms, Cripps added.

Erik Jacobson, Symbian product manager, said that it is possible to build cross-platform code. "If a big IT department supports BlackBerry and Symbian, it should be developing in Java," Jacobson said. In the case where an application has to run on Windows Mobile and Symbian, developers could instead choose C++. He added that a firm called Red Five Labs has released a port of Microsoftís .Net Compact Framework that enables applications developed for this platform to run unchanged on Symbian handsets.

Symbian OS also this year gained Pips, a compatibility layer that supports the Posix application programming libraries. This enables many business and open-source applications to be ported with minimum effort, the company said.

"We looked at what is happening on Unix, where a lot of code is written for Posix. So we put a layer in on top of Symbian OS, and said to developers, 'Whatever you are doing on server and desktop, you can run on a phone'. It may need a few days extra coding, but will be a lot less work to mobilise," Jacobson said.

Carney said that Apple's iPhone has put the spotlight on browser-based applications, adding that many of those created for the iPhone will run unmodified on Symbian handsets.

"Widgets are basically a web page without a border. They are based on CSS and Ajax, so should work on any device," Carney said.

Cripps said that because of this, the iPhone could force developers to use web standards to create applications. These would more likely be cross-platform or much easier to port to other environments.

"The most important thing about iPhone is that it vindicates this approach for web-based widgets," Cripps added.

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