Ocasta

With the release of more new phones yesterday Nokia also published a press release outlining the future of the Series 60 platform.

Series 60 will extend to both volume mid-range and high-end categories, becoming a truly scalable and feature-rich platform.
...
Scalability of Series 60 for multiple device categories will result in maximal number of available applications, maximal interoperability and compliancy.

Clearly this is as much a branding exercise as a technical one. Series 60 has been around for around three years and has the highest profile of all the Nokia smartphone platforms. But as a developer it scares me.

As much as I like the Series 60 phones they have, to date, been a bit of a nightmare as a development platform. In particular the when it comes to cross-platform compatability. My current project has been required to operate across most of the Series 60 range - 3650, 3660, Siemens SX-1, 6600, 7610 & the forthcoming 6630. I know that some of these use different Symbian OS version and are therefore not expected to be entirely compatable, but these six phones supposedly only fall into two of Nokia's Developer Platforms. According to this document compatibility exists within a given Developer platform. I beg to differ.

So far each phone has behaved differently and required code changes. There have been many causes, here are some of them:

• Key features (http support!) missing in Symbian 6.1
• Features not working as advertised (all versions)
• API's changed or stop working between phones
• Memory managment varies between phones

We aren't even doing anything particularly complex - no DRM, no audio, no 3D. On top of that Symbian signing is required for each version we ship. Maybe now you start to see why a greater variety of Series 60 devices worries me.

I don't expect Nokia to fix these problems over night. But if Nokia want the developer community to build applications that work across many Series 60 devices I do hope that they will start to focus on platform compatability (backwards and sideways). When I upgrade my PC from one Windows or OSX release to the next most of my applications continue to work. Even Lifeblog doesn't run on the 6630 I have in front of me.