Jo Harlow – Insights into Symbian Future

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Over at Mobile world Congress , I and Brett Haggard from South Africa , also had the chance to meet Jo Harlow , Vice President, Category Management Live Category at Nokia , we asked her some tricky questions and the once she asnwered almost laid down Nokia’s symbian strategy bare in font of us .

My Questions are marked SA , Brett’s questions are maked B and Jo Harlow’s answers are marked JH

Jo Harlow started with that since beginning of October , Nokia had been working on Symbian ^3 and development of Symbian UI and making it ready for Launch and in the coming weeks newer devices are expected .

In terms of Symbian UI , Symbian ^3 is more modern , contemporary and have extended functionality in terms of customization , higher graphic level , increasing speed and removes what frustrates people like double tapping and un necessary prompts .

Symbian ^3 is going to be competitive platform on which Nokia had been focusing for past 4 months along with E72 and 5230 launches .

SA : Talking about E72 , it’s a near perfect phone , the mail experience is seemless but one thing which I misses is the TV Out like in the N Series , are there any plans to bring TV Out to E Series ?

JH : I think you will see this functinlaity in the future

B: The Symbian ^3 is it specific to Nokia or other hardware vendors can also access it

JH : It’s part of Symbian ^3 so everyone will have access to it

B: So than how do you plan to differentiate it with others

JH : Symbian within Nokia is to bring out our services story , on top of Symbian platform we have maps , free navigation , email and thse experience differentiate what Nkia is offering versus what others will be offering in Symbian .

SA : With Symbian 3 which devices you are aiming at will there be low end , or high end or combination of both

JH : ,I cannot talk about it right now , but there will be a portfolio of products as we had in the past likie E and N Series previously ,there are two different growth areas , high end is hot bed of competitive activity and low end is where more consumers are interested in , they want feature phones and entry level phones which our portfolio will allow us to take advantage of.

SA : Should we expect a low price S^3 phone

JH : I can’t say what you will see but not an extremely low price , but where 5230 is today that’s the territory we are looking too

SA : Samsung has Rs low priced touch phones in $120 category with Face Book and Twitter is Nokia targeting this market too

JH : That’s what my colleagues had been discussion , with S40 we are offering a complete feature set with facebook and Twitter .

SA : But there is no touch in S40

JH : – Today we don’t have touch in S40 is an accurate comment

B: Nokia is now working on two operating systems Symbian and open Source Linux and there had been a lot of speculation about Symbian’s future but QT is taking advantage of both platforms , my question is why it’s so important for Nokia to continue with Symbian . ?

JH : You have to look at where is the growth in the market place and how it’s manifesting itself , a lot of activity is in high end devices and also now is is involving in other device types , we have E-Readers , Tablets , net books etc where MeeGo is an asset . On the other hand is mass market space has a lot of interest into smart phones , Symbian being scalable allows us to take services to the mass market and have more mass market consumer more into our services offerings . Symbian being phone centric OS with rich feature set around Internet usage and application environment etc I think this is a dynamic market that our software strategy is to be able to exploit the opportunity of resistance in the market place than to move in one direction and not have the agility needed to address the development that you se happening .

B : Is Linux not that adaptable to bring it down to low end devices ?

JH : I don’t see it’s incapable , Linux devices that our out , their the processing requirements and how low is that scale , it changes over time

B: So Right now Symbian is best for mass market

JH : Yes

SA : How about applications for Application for Symbian , like iPhone has ?

JH : There is a couple of things , we have found out that Symbian native development is more complicated than for others that’s why we have QT , developer friendly environment and create access to millions to Symbian applications

SA : So QT is going to be the key to a vast array of applications

JH : For our strategy yes

B: Taking iPhone as an example , it has a relatively static hardware but user experience has evolved with customization , Nokia’s strategy is hardware , with different form factors , different keypads and offerings. Is it going to change with a couple of device with all the option ?

JH : We are now working on fewer devices on our portfolio and and cutting it by half for this year . but I don’t believe in cutting it all the way down to one or two devices . Software is a very strong differentiator be it Android or iphone and what we have seen in the past is a specific device becoming an icon and later customer wants to be different later on ( How many iPhone variants can you have ) . Touch is not enough , we have seen business users not finding touch devices to be friendliest and even the young people who are texting at places where they are not supposed to like under the table in classroom are finding it difficult to use .

B : What about have one device which people can customize according to their needs with the software

JH : Yes but still physical artifacts matter , Apple is a good example , they have iPod Touch , iPhone and iPad all with very consistent design language , what we try is to drive the over all value and focus on consumer devices

SA : In Nokia Capital Markets Day , you talked about S^3 and S^4 is S^3 meant for mid tier and S^4 meant for high end devices

JH : Symbian 4 is a very different UI from Symbian ^3 . S^3 has the same Symbian structure as earlier with lot of improvements for graphics , with S^4 we are moving away from familiar and moving into something very new and focus on personalization and customized content you want to interact with

SA : So right now S^3 is coming and later in the year S^4 will be launched so should be wait for S^4 and forgo Symbian ^3 ?

JH : I think consumers are in the market to buy the devices be it S^3 or S^4 . Some may wait for S^4 but they are those on the top of the pyramid . With the increased functionality we are offering with S^3 , we think general consumers will buy the Symbian ^3 devices .

SA : This is one question you don’t answer , what is half the portfolio , does this half has a number ?

JH : Laughs and said sorry can’t answer that- ( I was well it’s worth a try )

B : ( In context the voice quality of my recording for later review was very low here ) Is Symbian later will be ported onto netbooks and other devices beside cell phones ?

JH : This is an area of exploration for mobile computing corporate unit , We are using MeeGo and from the Symbian perspective we are not working on planning on expanding it in this direction

SA : Any chance to changes the processors from ARM to Snap Dragons by Toshiba ?

JH : We are constantly in process of development of our chip set strategy and find most competitive but I can’t give any

And our Interview ended .

It was a great Interview as far as I think with Jo Harlow sharing some snippets from

• Symbian ^4 devices to come out in Q4 2010
• MeeGo to be used in E-Readers and Internet Tablets
• Series 40 to have touch Screen capability
• Symbian ^3 devices to cost same as 5230 i.e Euro 125
• Upcoming E Series to have TV-OUT functionality

I’d like to thank Jo Harlow for taking time out for the interview and giving us all the insights

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Tagged as: Apple, Future, Nokia, Symbian 4