Lee Williams from Symbian Foundation

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Last week I was in Monaco attending to Nokia Developer Summit. It was an event full of interesting news for mobile developers. One of the most interesting speakers was Lee Williams, executive director at the Symbian Foundation. Lee Williams previously worked at Palm and in the development of the S60 interface for Nokia. Now, his mission is to help to create the most widely used mobile platform in the world in an open way. And he is truly determined to do it.

His speech at the summit was mainly an overview of the Symbian Foundation and the advantages of Symbian going open source. Some of the best sentences were about the independence of the Foundation, the need for open APIs and how developers are now “all powerful, robotic duck overlords”. It is true, programmers are a key element for a successful mobile platform.

I was talking with Mr. Williams after his keynote and asked him a few questions.

NMT: Symbian has about 14 million lines of code and one of the main complaints is the difficult learning curve to program on it. Do you think going open source will help to reduce that complexity?

Lee Williams: Of course. That’s one of the benefits of open source, the feedback from the community. Symbian is going to be published in different packages with different content. Some packages will be interesting for third party developers, some for network operators or phone manufacturers. Our goal is to have everybody cooperating to create the best mobile platform. Moreover, Symbian will continue to offer several options to developers, Open C, QT libraries and Web RunTime are in the future roadmap.

NMT: Maybe .Net also?

Lee Williams: We are open to that. We talk and know the work from Red Five Labs, it will depend on what price and licensing model they are thinking of.

NMT: In your keynote you have compared the mobile platforms in terms of number of control points, return of investment or time to market. In your slides, it looked like Apple and Symbian seemed to have the same level in these areas, why is that?

Lee Williams: Yes, that’s true. I have made a comparison of different attributes and I think Apple and Symbian are at the same level of attractiveness for developers and manufacturers. But there is one main difference, Symbian is an open system. The future is in open platforms.

NMT: Following the Apple-Symbian subject… what do you prefer: thousands or hundreds of applications?

Lee Williams: Personally I would like to have the best of both worlds. It is not a question of a great number of applications, but a great number of good quality applications. Our mission is to establish the foundation for others to create the apps, so time will tell which model follows Symbian.

NMT: The access to source code looks usefulness for normal users. Is Symbian just for geeks?

Lee Williams: We are not going to overlook the normal user. Publish the code and create a developer community is on the technical side, but we want users to understand the great number of possibilities Symbian devices are offering. We are going to push this idea further in the near future.

NMT: You published a post of Symbian running on an Intel Atom chipset, we’ll see computers running Symbian soon?

Lee Williams: Well, that was a proof of concept, there is still a lot of work to do about that. We wanted to show Symbian versatility as an operating system. If a manufacturer wants to make a netbook with Symbian, it can be done… and that development will contribute to the community also.

NMT: Ok. Thank you for your time Mr. Williams, just the last one: what’s your favourite Symbian phone? And application?

Lee Williams: I’m using right now the Nokia N97, which is a very good device. I’m also very proud of the optimization work done over the Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic. Regarding software I am using Gravity, I know the author and I think it’s one of the best programs created on Symbian.