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Europe's PDAs: Giga Analyst Carl Zetti on the Symbian Alliance
by David Sims02/09/2000
U.S. consumers and developers are familiar with the two dominant platforms here -- the Palm operating system and Windows CE -- but a third handheld operating system is popular in Europe: The EPOC operating system out of Psion Corporation and the Symbian alliance. Carl Zetti, a senior industry analyst with Giga Information Group, recently wrote that, although some members of the Symbian alliance have made agreements with Palm Computing to use its operating system in products, this does not foretell the end of EPOC. O'Reilly Network Editorial Director David Sims recently talked with Carl about handhelds in Europe. He started by asking Carl to explain what Symbian and EPOC are.
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Carl Zetti: I think Symbian is best known in Europe for a couple of reasons. One is that smart phones themselves are more advanced in Europe than they are here in the U.S. And the other is Psion, the company originally behind the EPOC operating system is also best known in Europe. Psion is a U.K.-based manufacturer that was creating PDAs back when Palm was still a twinkle in somebody's eye, but they didn't quite hit the sweet-spot the way Palm did. They still managed to prosper and today they have a range of PDAs that are comparable to the professional handheld size of Window CE devices. In other words, a quarter-ETA kind of screen with a keyboard that you can type on.
Sims: So, a keyboard like the HP PDAs?
Zetti: Yeah, absolutely. And, those devices run the EPOC 32 operating system. So, that operating system is actually quite mature and has been around for a little while. Psion saw, along with three of the leading mobile telephone manufacturers, namely Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson and also Matsushita from the U.S., perhaps better known for their brand names Toshiba and Panasonic than as Matsushita, that the coming convergence of PDAs in smart phones offered a tremendous opportunity. So, together those organizations created the Symbian Alliance, which has been evolving the EPOC 32 operating system from a PDA operating system to one more suitable for high-end smart phones. They all combine in one device -- functionality that today we think of as telephony, and functionality that today we think of as PDAs.
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| Psion's Revo handheld computer spots a QWERTY keyboard on top of an EPOC 32 operating system. |
Sims: Let me back up just a second. You had mentioned that smart phones are further evolved in Europe and I have also read that they're further evolved in Japan. Why is that?
| "In America we have a patchwork of different technical standards, in Europe it's much more regulated and, therefore, much more uniform." |
Zetti: Partly it's the technology base. Certainly in Europe there's been much more cooperation. So, whereas in America we have such a mishmash and patchwork of different technical standards in different parts of the country, in Europe it's much, much more regulated and, therefore, much more uniform. So, it's possible, for example, today to go out and buy a GSM phone that will work pretty much anywhere across much of Europe.
The other driver in Europe is that conventional wired phone service is much poorer and much more expensive than in the U.S. So, the motivation to go to a wireless phone is much higher. One of the intriguing parts that you see in Europe is that the worse the wire network, the higher the uptake of cellular phones. In countries like Italy, for example, cell phones have been almost universal for some years now. And in countries like Finland, for example, with very sparse population areas in the north, it's much more attractive to have a cell phone than to lay wires all across vast tracts of sparsely populated countries.
Sims: Sounds like a reliability issue as well as an economic issue then that's driving it.
Zetti: Yeah, both those factors together. Plus you've got large populations of professional people that are very accepting of new technology.
Sims: So, how has development been handled within the Symbian Alliance on this EPOC 32, is there a -- does Psion still direct development and these partners add features and add to the development as they see fit or how has development been handled?
Zetti: Well, Symbian is a collaborative development. Psion contributes the base technology and then the organization jointly develops enhancements to it and makes it into a telephony platform. After that, they create five reference platforms for different formats of devices. So, you'll see Symbian-based devices in a variety of formats. For example, conventional looking phones with very small screens as well as phones that look like the device that James Bond used in one of his recent movies that looks like a phone until you open it in half and it looks like a PDA. Symbian creates, therefore, five of these reference platforms in different formats that the manufacturers then license back to do with as they wish and enhance in various ways providing they respect the EPOC 32 APIs that allow EPOC applications to run on devices from any manufacturer. One example of that, for example, is Nokia's deal with 3Com to license the Palm OS. Their plan is to take the best parts of the Palm user interface and run that on top of EPOC 32, but it will still be an EPOC 32 device.
| "Nokia's plan is to take the best parts of the Palm user interface and run that on top of EPOC 32, but it will still be an EPOC 32 device." |
Sims: You had written that Nokia's agreement with 3Com is best seen as an attempt to differentiate its Symbian offerings from its competitors. Is it the user interface, is it the familiarity with the UI, or is it seen as a better UI?
Zetti: Yeah, I think, you know, Palm has been hugely successful because it demonstrated what people were really looking for in a handheld device with simplicity of use. And Palm meets that criterion absolutely. In fact, one of the great emphases in the original design that made it so successful was that simplicity. One industry anecdote holds that part of the original design process for the Palm was to walk around with a block of wood with some Post-It Notes stuck to the front as a design prototype. Whether that's true or not, it certainly reflects the emphasis on simplicity the designers had in mind. If you've tried using even a typical cell phone today, most people don't use most of the functions that are on there, such as number recall or setting up a list of names of users that they dial frequently simply because the user interface is so hard to use. So, when you've got an organization like Symbian and you've got all of the key handset manufacturers, Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Matsushita, all agreeing to a standard, somehow they have to find ways to differentiate their products from each other, and this is Nokia's way.
Sims: Interestingly, though, the first wireless phone to use the Palm OS is a sort of operating system or interface where the phone has been Qualcomm with their PDQ phone that I believe came out last summer, and you consider that a limited success, is that right? That hasn't been an overwhelming success, you'd say?
Zetti: That's right. They kind of missed the sweet-spot in a number of ways with that device. One was that it really didn't provide a great deal of integration between the telephony features and the PDA features. It was just, you know, both sets of functions in one place physically. The other problem is that it was very bulky. It wasn't a convenient device to carry around. So, the form factor wasn't quite right. And a lot of the usability really hadn't been thought about thoroughly. For example, if you're talking to somebody on the QualComm phone and you want to look up something or take notes in the PDA part on the conversation you're having, you can't do that because you're holding the PDA to your ear. It just doesn't make sense. What makes the Symbian platform much more compelling is the idea of integrating the features of the two in ways that leverage the strengths of both. For example, Web browsing combining the input and display capabilities of the PDA with the wireless conductivity of the phone.
| "The form factor of QualComm's PDQ wasn't quite right. If you're talking to somebody on the phone and you want to look up something or take notes, you can't do that because you're holding the PDA to your ear." |
Sims: And that makes sense and I assume that there were at least this sort of dialing integration where you would look somebody up in the directory in your Palm OS and be able to dial that with the tap, but was that not the case with the PDQ?
Zetti: No, that existed, but that was about as far as it went. And, let's face it, you could do that today with a lot of devices that are not as big and as clumsy.
Sims: That's true, you don't need a Palm OS to be able to tap on someone's name and dial out of a directory like that.
Zetti: No. And, in fact, Qualcomm has now actually given up on that business. Recently we heard that they're selling off the entire phone operation with all the assets to Kyocera.
Sims: Interestingly, you talked about Motorola possibly building up an alliance that was something of a competitor to Symbian. Is this centered at all around its iDEN technology, and I know it wanted to -- it was talking to 3Com about iDEN, or at least 3Com developers.
Zetti: I don't know if that's involved, but Motorola's whole strategy is very confusing. It's a very diverse, and in many ways loosely coupled, organization. The different divisions of Motorola don't always seem to communicate with each other quite as well as they should. And, although it's announced that it's licensing the Palm OS and 3Com, it really hasn't made it all clear in the way that Nokia has how it sees that playing with EPOC. It's not at all clear whether Motorola intends to integrate the two in the way that Nokia does or whether it intends to build separate phones based on the two platforms and let the market decide, or even whether it sees Palm OS as the better choice than Symbian. You know, if looking at Motorola seems confusing I think it's because Motorola themselves are confused.
| "If looking at Motorola seems confusing I think it's because Motorola themselves are confused." |
Sims: You have also written that Ericsson has moved away from working with Microsoft Windows CE on some of its smart phones and is moving to Psion and I also had heard that Philips was moving away from CE. Are you seeing a migration away from CE in this space? Is it particular to this space or, you know, are there other reasons people are migrating to alternative platforms here?
Zetti: Oh, I think not only Philips also Everex announced that they were dropping CE and we've seen that CE really hasn't been successful in the palm-size format. Microsoft really hasn't figured out the design point here yet and again it comes back to that simplicity. If you compare the look and feel of a Windows CE palm-size device, it's essentially your desktop crushed. And, frankly, it's about as readable as if somebody took a piece of paper off your desktop and crushed it, whereas the Palm OS is famous with simplicity. We've seen several manufacturers move away from that. But, the game isn't up for Windows CE and at the same time there are other manufacturers that are adopting Windows CE and hoping to use it as the basis of a smart phone.
Sims: Are you familiar with the developer programs, the competitive developer programs between 3Com's Palm OS developer program and the CE developer program?
Zetti: Both are well funded, both are aggressive, and both organizations have recognized that winning the hearts and minds of developers is key to the success here.
Sims: And is Psion on board with its, with a competitive developer program?
Zetti: Yes, Psion also plans to have several tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people signed up with its developer program. Everybody recognizes that this is absolutely the key to success, because this is one of those markets. Like the early days of the PC versus the Mac, where once we get past the initial wave of enthusiastic technology adopted, people are going to adopt these for their functionality and their capabilities and that means what applications run on the platform and in order to be the platform that has the most applications running on it. You've clearly got to woo the developers. Palm has a big head start there in that it is by far the coolest platform and, therefore, the most attractive to developers. But, as we've seen in the past with, for example, it's evangelization of Visual Basic, Microsoft are past masters at knowing how to woo the development community.
Sims: Do you think Palm splitting off from 3Com is going to help its development efforts?
Zetti: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a smart move for 3Com. This isn't a core business for it and when they first took over Palm, what they did was really stifle the creativity of that organization and lose the focus. Giving it its independence again is really going to improve things. We've already seen some of the fruits of that under the current president, Alan Kessler, Palm has regained a lot of its vitality and a lot of its innovation and creativity.
Sims: And, the Handspring devices, that sort of seemed to me a significant point because it seemed to be a competitive hardware platform with the same operating system and generate a lot of interest and excitement around a whole new sort of user base that might not have been attracted to the professional-looking Palm.
Zetti: Right. And, of course, it's the people that originally founded Palm in the first place that are running Handspring. So, intriguingly, if you talk to Handspring it turns out that they're getting a lot of attention from business users as well because of the expandability through the Handspring port.
Sims: And the price-point too?
Zetti: And the price-point too. You can't argue with a lower price. In a sense, this is good for Palm in that one of the criticisms that it faced before was that there was only a single source and, as with the PC versus the Apple Macintosh, multiple windows would crush a single vendor. Well now you've got multiple vendors building around the Palm platform which is going to spur innovation and lower prices and also make people in business situations feel a lot more confident about buying and not feeling that they're locked into a single vendor. It's got to be good all around for the whole Palm community.
David Sims is editorial director of the O'Reilly Network.
