At the same time, screens are getting larger – fast. While there may be a physical limit on the display size for a mobile device, resolutions continue to grow. Just a couple of years ago, QVGA (240×320) was the standard resolution for smartphones. The iPhone and all the first generation Android devices double this at HVGA (320×480) and Symbian^1 is 50% larger still at nHD (640×360) – three times the number of pixels as QVGA. Symbian^3 supports WVGA (800×480) – as seen on the Maemo powered Nokia N900 – that’s 5 times as many pixels as a QVGA display.

Pushing up to five times as many pixels at a display with only 2 or 3 times as much CPU power available, while expecting far more from the graphics means that a much greater fraction of the processing resources are going towards graphics. Unfortunately, general purpose CPUs are not actually very efficient at handling graphics, which is why we all have GPUs in our PCs. Now mobile devices are following this trend. The iPhone jumped ahead on the UX front partly by building a hardware accelerated UI. The proposal for Symbian^4′s UI currently states that it is likely to require hardware graphics acceleration (in the Technical Solution Description document).

Hardware graphics acceleration is fantastic for the UI possibilities it brings, but also a nightmare for the emulation environment. Devices have slightly different standards to PCs (e.g. OpenGL ES vs OpenGL) and if you want to take advantage of the graphics hardware on the PC to avoid a really slow emulation environment (emulated ARM instructions doing software rendering…oh dear) then you need to step outside the emulator’s sandbox. For the Symbian Virtual Platform, that means we need to tunnel the drawing operations through a virtual peripheral to a translation layer which renders them using OpenGL 2.0 on the PCs graphics card. Also, to retain the SVP’s cross-platform compatibility we need to use a platform independent method of setting up the windows/surfaces – perhaps QEMU’s current SDL, GLFW, or maybe even Qt.

The details are still being worked out, but if the final solution provides virtual peripherals for QEMU which implement Open GL ES, OpenVG, EGL and OpenWF (all Khronos standards) then it may well be of interest to platforms other than Symbian too. It would be great if Symbian could start sharing more useful stuff with the rest of the open source community. Anyone interested in following this work can subscribe to our qemu-dev mailing list.

In October, the Symbian Kernel was released into the open source world. Here is the announcement. This week Tyson Key published an introduction to SVP on the Symbian Blog. Momentum is building. You’ll find the roadmap here.  It is broken down into three sections: milestones, new features, and bugs.  You can see what we are working on as bugs and features are assigned. [aside: there is a lot of work with respect to S60 which is not reflected on the in the roadmap, yet. ]

Milestones are broken down into 4 to 6 week intervals. When we hit a milestone, we will release the associated image for QEMU. This allows individuals to download it and quickly play with it via QEMU. While the initial milestone(s) will only run on windows, this cross-platform approach will run in Linux, Mac and Windows by the time it is released.  The first milestone is scheduled for December 15th.  This will be a text shell based image and will also contain test suites.  Hopefully we will be able to get some other goodies in there too. If you have something to contribute, December 7th is the deadline for this milestone. The next one is scheduled for January 19th.

There is much to do: new features, additional device drivers, new host platforms and test failures to analyze/fix.  Join our dynamic group of smart developers and contribute to enabling the Symbian community with world-class emulation.  Contact me if you’d like more details about getting involved.

-John

The oldest of these games are the early arcade machines, like Asteroids and Pac-Man. A group of arcade enthusiasts created the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to keep the old games alive. The code for MAME is publicly available and it was ported to Symbian devices very early on, starting with Symbian’s original incarnation as EPOC32 on the Psion Series 5. MAME has evolved over the years, and with it have come ports to more recent Symbian devices, right up to the current Nokia 5800XM port. Note: Some of the original arcade games have been released for free use with MAME, others have been re-sold commercially but many more are used without permission and cannot legally be redistributed while they remain in copyright.

Moving on to some fairly early PC games that translate well to the modern touch screen device, there were some excellent point-and-click adventure games such as the Monkey Island series and Day of the Tentacle. A popular open source project, the ScummVM, re-implements a large number of the engines that drove these games, allowing owners of the original game data files to play them on other platforms. For several years now, one of those platforms has been Symbian. Some of the games, like Beneath a Steel Sky (pictured above) have been released as freeware by the original developers.

If you want something that pushes the capabilities of your mobile device a little further, then perhaps the Quake series of games are for you? The source code to the Quake games was released by id Software and ported to Symbian by Olli Hinkka. Unfortunately you’ll need one of a very limited set of devices to play these games, as they are quite closely tied to the hardware for performance reasons. Olli has provided versions that can take advantage of hardware 3D graphics acceleration where it’s available – if you want to play Quake III Arena then you’ll need it!

Using the keypad of the device might not be ideal for controlling this type of game. There’s support for a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if you’ve got them in the latest game, but how about this for an alternative option – using accelerometers and TV-Out!

It seems almost everyone is talking about the “mobile web” these days, whether they’re optimising existing web content for mobile devices, or building cutting edge web applications (or widgets as we tend to call them). However, for almost 2 years now, some smart folks at Nokia have pushed the frontiers of the mobile web a step further by providing a mobile web server. The project, called PAMP (Personal Apache MySQL and PHP), is also open source in case you want to play with the code. At its core this project is a port of the LAMP stack, which powers about 40% of the world’s websites, to the Symbian platform and there is a great interview with the project lead describing the challenges involved and potential uses. It’s not anywhere near as difficult as you might think, since there has been ever increasing support for a Linux-like programming environment on Symbian in recent years.

Now you may well ask, “Why on earth would I want a web server on my phone?”. If you’re thinking of launching the next big online retailer then you almost certainly don’t want it on a mobile. In fact, standard web site don’t make much sense at all on mobile devices unless you live in a country where PCs and fixed line internet aren’t available. However, what we’re really talking about here is HTTP access to a phone, and if you extend the standard web server stack slightly to include access to various phone features then all sorts of things become possible. First there’s context; you could let people access your location as you roamed around with your web server in your pocket long before Google Latitude came along. Also, this form of sharing needs no central service and leaves you in complete control of who accesses your information, with no concerns about location privacy. Similarly, since you can access features like calendar, messaging, call log, contacts and gallery via REST APIs it is possible to build mobile applications, or widgets that talk to the server. One such application that was created slightly ahead of its time was a group calendar widget, much like the O2 Joggler, only without the need for a separate device.

You can develop your own custom extensions to the mobile web server in Python. Another interesting possibility that this easily enables is setting up a remote surveillance camera (or just a webcam) instantly anywhere. I’ll leave your imaginations to mull over the endless possibilities of remote access to thousands or even millions of powerful mobile computers equipped with advanced sensor devices…