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• Mobile

By Natasha Lomas, 28 October 2008 15:20

NEWS

The bottom line
The five OEM founding members - LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson - will split the operational costs of the Foundation between them. Nokia is in the process of buying Symbian to hand its code to the Foundation and clearly sees this platform as a serious part of its software strategy going forward.

Williams said: "We need to make sure no one party benefits from or takes all the air out of the room of the ecosystem in terms of opportunities to return on the investments those would make here.

"It has to be a situation where Nokia doesn't just benefit but Samsung doesn't just benefit or Motorola doesn't just benefit, but that anybody - whether you have a million euro VC investment in our small software start-up to anybody who many want to put hundreds of millions of euros of an investment into the Foundation's assets - can realise an immediate return there."

Another challenge on the road ahead is making sure widgets are "a key part of the offering" as they are on the S60 platform, said Williams.

Widgets are small web apps that run directly from the start screen of a mobile device with one-click, rather than being buried several layers down in menus.

Williams added: "One of the most powerful strategic aspects of the platform system is in the area of a web runtime [widgets]. We have a very complete web runtime that needs to remain a key part of the offering."

He added that building a "proper" hardware abstraction layer is another challenge on the road ahead, in order to ensure the platform can easily interface with a variety of mobile hardware.

He added: "It has been a bit of a hurdle for those doing product creation with Symbian - and S60-based and MOAP- and UIQ-based assets to bring up on a wide variety of hardware and so we need a hardware abstraction layer in the offering as quickly as possible."

To date, some 300 companies have registered their interest in the Foundation via its website, and while Williams would not be drawn on specific companies currently in talks about signing up he said: "We've been happy to have and pleasantly surprised companies like Visa and Huawei and ARM and others have recently come in and expressed interest in the Foundation."

Asked where he sees the Foundation in five years' time, Williams told silicon.com: "I see it being the hub for what will be the de facto technology standard certainly in mobile - and you could argue it'll reach further into consumer electronics and a few other markets."