17 February 2007

Richard Bloor talks exclusively to Symbian

Richard Bloor has an interesting interview over the SymbianOne about new Symbian OS version 9.5, with Jorgen Behrens (EVP marketing), Bruce Carney (director of developer programs and services) and Ian Hutton (v9.5 product manager).

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but with Symbian OS v9.5 there are free third-party application performance improvements, along with a host of new features.

Richard Bloor talks exclusively to Symbian about the latest incarnation of its operating system.

Jorgen Behrens, EVP marketing: The performance improvements we are delivering will mean that applications run faster. Importantly for developers many of these improvements are available without having to change a single line of code.

For example, many applications, particularly those which have been designed to run on multiple operating systems, use large DLLs. These are inevitably slow to load because the entire DLL needs to be in RAM before an application can start using it. Developers can overcome this issue by breaking their DLLs down into small units. However, this inevitably involves significant effort. With demand paging the operating system effectively breaks the DLL into small units for the developer, giving in instant performance improvement with no coding effort.

We believe we have created a particularly efficient implementation of demand paging. On our test boards we have seen large applications, such as web browsers, starting almost before the user can release the select key.

Similarly, file system caching will have a big impact on application performance, particularly for data intensive applications. Again developers don't have to change any code to take advantage of this. However, they can programmatically enable and disable caching to achieve the right balance between performance and data integrity.

These changes will have a big impact on application performance, but importantly third-party developers can take advantage of them without any need to optimize their applications.

Richard: Are users going to see real performance improvements, or is performance simply compensating for the additional features?

Jorgen: We feel that users will see a significant performance improvement. These changes are doing much more than simply keeping up with advances in functionality.

Richard: What about device manufacturers, will improvements in RAM handling simply compensate for a larger ROM?

Jorgen: We impose a limit on ourselves in terms of code growth to around a megabyte a year; this is not an awful lot. In addition, many of the new features are configurable, so if a device doesn't include the hardware to utilize a particular piece of operating system code it can be omitted from the phone. Fortunately, the operating system is very modular from this point of view.

We often get asked whether we may one day release a Symbian OS Lite. We don't see the need to do this because good engineering allows us to add functionality or renew whole subsystems, like the IP networking stack, without growing the hardware requirements. In fact, features such as demand paging potentially reduce the hardware required.

For example, despite the additional functionality delivered in v9.5 when it is booted up on a reference board there is more free memory than with v9.1 or v9.2 because of demand paging. This means device manufacturers have options to deliver phones with less memory, but similar performance to today's devices; deliver the same memory as we are seeing in today's devices, but let the user do more; or add more memory and allow the user to do even more.

Richard: This may seem like a silly question, but what happened to v9.4?

Jorgen: There is in fact a v9.4, but we did not publicly announce it as it is a fairly minor release. Most of its features are under-the-hood. These features are important to our licensees, but have little or no direct impact on developers and end-users.

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