The Symbian OS (779886), страница 9
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The jumpto ARM was intentional, because Intel was clearly not a player in that fieldand ARM was already doing well and had ambitions to become far moreimportant in that space, so it was quite a strategic move. And part of themindset behind the next generation operating system was to target ARM. Evenat that point David Potter could see that handheld computers and PDAs andcell phones would converge. And that’s why in ’96, before the Series 5 wasactually shipped, Psion put its software division out into a separate company,specifically so that it could look at licensing its software externally.The very first of those early collaborations was a project to createthe software for a mobile companion device for the Philips Ilium phone.The companion and phone clipped together back to back and connectedthrough a hardware slot on the back of the phone, turning it into aPDA/Communicator with 4 MB RAM, a Series 5-sized landscape-modetouch screen, a choice of soft (on-screen) keyboard or handwritingrecognition and a full PDA application suite including calendar, organizerand contacts book.
Communications functions included email, web, fax,SMS and full voice calling.17The software was based on the November 1997 Message Suite releaseof EPOC (also used in the Series 5 mx), which added email and webapplications, dial-up networking and TCP/IP, the C Standard Library andthe Message Suite itself. The project was publicly announced as thePhilips Ilium/Accent and showed at CeBIT at the end of 1998, but it nevercame to market.Martin Budden was the technical lead on the project, which involvedwriting not just a bespoke user interface, but also a complete applicationssuite including messaging and contacts applications.
As he says, it wasa significant amount of work. However, compared with later projects,these were very much toe-in-the-water exercises, both for Symbian andits licensees. On the Symbian side, the team was relatively small, perhapsa dozen developers working on the user interface and applications andhalf as many again working on the software port to new hardware.17The Ilium is described at www.noodlebug.demon.co.uk/goingmob/spphiila.htm.30THE HISTORY AND PREHISTORY OF SYMBIAN OSThe Philips device was the first licensee project (unless Psion itself iscounted as a licensee) but, most significantly, it was the first project togenerate licensing revenue in the form of pre-paid royalties.Martin Budden:The Philips project was the first bit of money that we ever got in from licensing;the first licensed product we ever got and made some money from.Other licensee projects followed, including the Series 5 look-alikeOsiris from Oregon Scientific and the Geofox One, a keyboard-basedPDA with a larger keyboard and screen than the Series 5 and with alaptop-style touchpad instead of a touchscreen.
It also added a built-inmodem and a standard Type II PCMCIA slot.While they demonstrate the enthusiasm with which Psion Software setout to develop a licensing model, all of these projects were ultimatelyfalse starts, failing to capture much attention from the market. Straight afterthe Philips project, Budden moved onto another small licensee project,working on behalf of Ericsson, and stayed as technical lead through theproject startup. While the biggest problem in the Philips project had beentrying to work around the limitations of the hardware design, which hadbeen more or less fixed before the start of the project, the Ericsson projectwas a true phone design. In particular, the hardware design provided arobust solution to the problem of communications between the phonehardware and the application processor.
As Budden says, the feeling onthe team was that the hardware design was right from the start.The fact that it was another phone project indicates where Psion sawthe market opportunities, but it also indicates the direction in which thelicensees saw the phone market moving. The goal of the Ericsson projectwas to create a mobile phone with full PDA functions, as full as was thenpossible. The result was the Ericsson R380, a breakthrough product notbecause it sold particularly well (it was probably too far ahead of both themarket and the current state of technology) but because it rehearsed keyprinciples which led the way to later successful Sony Ericsson Symbianphones, starting with the P800 and followed up by the highly successfulP900 family of phones.Biggest by far of all these projects was the collaboration with Nokiato create the Nokia 9210 Communicator, which started while the Philipsproject was still running.
While the Ericsson R380 team had roughlydouble the numbers of the Philips project, the Nokia 9210 projecteventually involved probably half the company; by the time it completed,the company had grown from 70 to over 200.The Nokia 9210 project completed after that of the Ericsson R380,but began before it. Earlier projects and, to some extent the EricssonDEVICE FAMILIES31Figure 2.2 The Ericsson R380Figure 2.3The first Symbian phone, the Nokia 9210 CommunicatorR380, had been based on snapshots of the evolving operating system(which was still named EPOC), with the deepest changes concerned withthe adaptation to new hardware and bespoke customization of the userinterface.
In contrast, the Nokia 9210 project drove a complete iterationof the operating system from the ER5 baseline to what became known,finally, as Symbian OS v6.0. Conceptually, the Nokia 9210 was the firstSymbian phone, even though it wasn’t the first to market (see Figure 2.3).The transition from the Series 5 to the Nokia 9210 was less a seriesof steps than a route march, four years of hard work (from inceptionto completion). Symbian OS has been (and will no doubt remain) acontinuous evolution towards a destination which is always one twist ofthe road away.2.7 Device FamiliesThe native EPOC graphical user interface (GUI), which defined the look,feel and interaction style of the device software, was known as Eikon.Eikon was designed for extensibility and customization.
However, the32THE HISTORY AND PREHISTORY OF SYMBIAN OSextent of the variations required by different customers, driven by theneeds of devices that, increasingly, were not PDAs but phones with PDAfunctions, significantly exceeded the assumptions of the original design.Each project effectively created a complete bespoke user interface, albeitfrom the common starting point of the Eikon code. Not only did thislevel of customization not scale, it was clearly threatening to fragmentthe platform.Martin Budden:The model of doing a bespoke user interface was already there. We dida bespoke user interface for Philips and for the Ericsson R380.
And forthe Nokia 9210 Communicator, again there was a new user interface toNokia’s specifications. But there were fundamental conflicts between theseuser interfaces, in practical terms of ‘Did they have pens?’ or ‘Were theykeyboard based?’ and ‘What was the screen size?’, but also in deeper terms ofthe whole user interface philosophy and what you expose to the user. And itjust became clear that if we did a user interface for every single phone, thatwasn’t going to be sustainable.Symbian’s solution was the so-called reference design strategy. Thespecific phone types were genericized to reference specifications: inpractice, that meant the keyboard-based Communicator-style device andthe pen-based ‘smartphone’ equipped with PDA functions and basedloosely on the Ericsson R380.
As well as a form-factor definition specifyingthe essential features of the physical design and therefore, in effect,parameterizing each design to a particular market point (in terms offeatures, size and key use cases), Symbian would supply a generic userinterface for each form-factor, which licensees would then customize.As realized in Symbian OS v6.0, devices were identified as ‘smartphones’ (phone form-factor devices) and ‘communicators’ (PDA formfactor devices). Communicators were further divided into keyboard-based(the Nokia 9210) and tablet-based devices (both Ericsson and Sanyoshowed off prototypes broadly similar to Palm or Windows CE devicessuch as the Pilot and iPaq).
Two reference user interfaces were includedin v6.0 as ‘device-ready’ designs: Crystal, which shipped with the Nokia9210 and which eventually became Nokia’s Series 80 user interface; andQuartz, which eventually evolved into UIQ.A number of other device family reference designs (DFRDs) wereproposed and several proceeded to reasonably advanced specification,including Sapphire which was split into Red and Blue variants, dependingon screen size and interaction mode (pen or keypad); Ruby, whichevolved from Red Sapphire; and Emerald, which encapsulated the originalsmartphone concept as realized in the Ericsson R380.
Neither Ruby norEmerald were announced or came to market. Blue Sapphire eventuallyDEVICE FAMILIES33evolved into the Pearl DFRD and finally reached market branded asthe Nokia Series 60 user interface (see Figure 2.4). Pearl had first beendefined as a ‘headless’ DFRD (without a user interface), before acquiringcode branched from Crystal and eventually unifying with the work whichhad been going on independently within Nokia to develop what wasknown as the ‘square’ user interface.18Pearl in effect became the first true smartphone platform (defined as aphone with information capabilities) and was realized in the first Series60 device, the Nokia 7650.Quartz, meanwhile, never came to market in its original form, thatof a tablet-style device most closely resembling a phone-enabled, penorientated PDA, which was dubbed the Mediaphone reference designwhen prototypes were shown at CeBIT in 2001.
The Quartz design hadoriginated at Symbian’s Ronneby site in Sweden. Originally an Ericssondevelopment laboratory specializing in Windows CE devices, the site hadbeen transferred to Symbian as part of the original Ericsson investment inthe consortium. Quartz quite clearly inherited Ronneby’s design legacy.However, the device format with which Quartz did eventually come tomarket, by this time rebranded UIQ, was the one pioneered by Ericssonwith the R380: pen-operated, a screen that could switch between portraitand landscape modes and with a key-pad flip. In, first, the P800 andthen the P900 (see Figure 2.5), this format has become a signature designof Sony Ericsson’s high-end, business-orientated range and has beenextremely successful.The Crystal user interface of the Nokia 9210 Communicator was eventually rebranded Series 80 (see Figure 2.6) and remains the basis for theproduct line which continues to evolve and innovate.
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