If you’ve been keeping your eye on the Symbian Smartphone Show website, you’ll have seen the plans for the keynote sessions taking shape over the last few weeks. The lineup looks particularly strong this year.
Day One (Tuesday 21st Oct) features:
- Nigel Clifford, Symbian CEO, presenting on “Symbian – 10 years of innovation – the next wave: Symbian Foundation Vision”
- Ho-Soo Lee, EVP of Mobile Solutions Center, Samsung
- Rob Shaddock, Corporate VP of Motorola, presenting on “Innovating in an open mobile world”.
These individual keynotes will be followed by a panel session, “Symbian Foundation – setting the future of mobile software free“, with speakers from the Symbian Foundation board member companies.
Day Two (Wednesday 22nd Oct) features:
- Kai Öistämö, EVP Devices, Nokia, presenting on “The future of smartphones”
- Mats Lindoff, CTO of Sony Ericsson, presenting on “Sony Ericsson and the Symbian Foundation: Open to innovation and differentiation”
- Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech, presenting on “Symbian & Qt: the best of both worlds”.
Again, these individual presentations will be followed by a panel session, “Who will win the runtime race“:
As the consumer’s appetite for increasingly advanced mobile services grows, the decision of choosing which runtime environment to support these services becomes vitally important. With many different leading runtime environments hosted on Symbian OS, both the vendor and developer communities are keeping a close eye on which will emerge as the preferred environment.
The speakers on this second panel cover many of the key mobile runtime environments:
- Andreas Constantinou, Research Director, VisionMobile – who has recently written the thought-provoking article “The 7 centres of gravity in mobile“
- Jürgen Scheible, Author of the book “Mobile Python: Rapid prototyping of applications on the mobile platform“
- Pete Barr-Watson, Senior Business Development/Deployment Manager, Microsoft Silverlight
- Simon Nicholson, Director Operator Engagement, Client Software Group, Sun Microsystems.
Of course, the keynotes are only one of many reasons to attend this show. For example, see here for the extended agenda for Day One, and here for the extended agenda for Day Two. And that only scratches the surface of the wider set of formal and informal activities that will take place.
It should be fascinating.
I’ve had the good fortune to be close to the heart of nearly all the major Psion and Symbian expo events, from 1992. The event in 2008 looks like it will top them all.
Footnote: There are likely to be more changes in the keynote lineup, during the whirlwind months in between now and the show itself. Check the official website for updates.
dw2 
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