David Wood is Executive VP, Research, Symbian. He was a founding director of Symbian in 1998, having joined Psion in June 1988, following an eight-year spell studying mathematics and the philosophy of science at Cambridge University. He pioneered the use of object-oriented technology within Psion in the late 1980s and went on to oversee the architectural development of Symbian OS.

From 1998 to 2002, he headed Symbian's Technical Consulting department, building and directing teams that worked with Symbian's customers to create the world's first smart phones. From 2003 to 2004 he was EVP of Partnering at Symbian, fostering sustained commercial success for companies in the Symbian ecosystem through Symbian's partner programs. As EVP of Research, Wood is now responsible for inter-departmental collaborative projects within Symbian, covering engineering, strategy and market development, focused on improving the competitiveness and value of Symbian's overall offering. In July 2005, Wood's first book was published: "Symbian for software leaders - principles of successful smart phone development projects"

Until quite recently, smart phones have been of interest mainly just
to "early adopters": the 5-10% of mobile phone users who have a
particular enthusiasm for the latest technology. But in the early months
of 2006, smart phones are breaking into the mass-market. Every year
since 2001, the number of users of smart phones has increased by at
24 TIMES GLOBAL JOURNAL - 2006 least a factor of two. There are good reasons to expect this exponential trend to continue. It's a trend with far-reaching implications - for computing, for communications, and for how we all conduct our work and play.

Smart phones differ from other kinds of mobile phones in two fundamental ways: how they are built, and what they can do. Smart phones are built from reusable software platforms, open standards, and interoperable plug-in systems, so they can take full advantage of the skills, energy, and innovation of numerous companies from a range of industries. This means that smart phones improve constantly and rapidly, year by year. As for what they can do - in line with the "phone" part of their name, smart phones use their in-built intelligence to provide all the capabilities of ordinary mobile phones, in a particularly user-friendly style.

In short, smart phones are rapidly becoming people's preferred mobile gateway into the ever growing, ever more important digital universe. They are also what has been termed as "pocket melting pots", since many innovative new patterns of usage arise from the overlap of functionality, in just one device, that formerly needed several different devices. Smart phones at the start of 2006 are roughly where the Internet was at the start of 1996. At the start of 1996, there were around 40 million users of the Internet worldwide. That's broadly the same number of users of smart phones there are in the world today. In 2006, you can sometimes hear the debate about the real value of smart phones. Will smart phones remain the preserve of a minority of users, or will they demonstrate mass market appeal?

Marketers and analysts would aver that smart phones are for all. Smart
phones will rapidly overtake and replace other categories of mobile phones, such as the "feature phones" that are currently highly popular. Smart phones are built from highly advanced technology, but they don't require a highly advanced understanding of technology in order to use them. Smart phones help us all to keep in better touch with friends and colleagues and information and discussions and buzz that are important to us, and they open up valuable new avenues for entertainment, education, and enterprise.

In 1996, some people wondered if the Internet would ever really be
"useful" (as opposed to a passing fad). Today, you may wonder if mobile
access to the Internet will ever really be useful. But if you look at what
smart phone users are already able to do, you'll soon see the benefit. If it's valuable to you to be able to access bbcnews.com or amazon.com or
ebay.com or imdb.com or google.com or wikipedia.org (etc.) from your
desktop PC, you'll often find it equally valuable to check these sites when you're away from your desktop. Because you'll be carrying your smart phone with you, almost everywhere you go, you'll have the option to keep in touch with your digital universe, whenever it suits you.

Crucial to this increase in value is the steady set of remarkable improvements that are taking place for both output and input mechanisms on smart phones. Screens have become clearer, larger, sharper, and more colourful. Handwriting recognition systems, intelligent word-completion systems, multi-way jog-dials, Bluetooth keyboards, and ingenious folding and twisting mechanisms, mean that it's easier than ever before to enter data into smart phones. And faster networks, more powerful on-board processors, and more sophisticated software, mean that data is rapidly fetched from the Internet and swiftly displayed on the screen.

In parallel, costs are dipping, further and further. In part, this is due to
Moore's Law, which summarises the steady technological improvements in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits and memory chips. But in large part, it's also due to the dramatic "learning effects" which can take place when world-class companies go through several rounds of finding better and better ways to manufacture their smart phone products. In turn, the magnitude of these "learning effects" depends on the open nature of the smart phone industry. Here, the word "open" has the following meanings:

Programmable: The intelligence and power that is in a smart phone can be adapted, extended, and enhanced by add-on applications and services, which tap into the underlying richness of the phone to produce powerful new functionality

Interchangeable: Services that are designed for use in one smart phone can be deployed on other smart phones as well, from different manufacturers (despite the differences between these smart phones), with minimal (often zero) changes; very importantly, this provides a better incentive to companies to invest the effort to create these new services

Collaborative: The process of creating and evolving smart phone products benefits from the input and ideas of numerous companies and individuals; for example, the manufacturers of the second generation of a given smart phone can build in some of the unexpectedly successful applications that were designed by previously unknown companies as add-ons to the first generation of that smart phone

Open-minded: The companies who create smart phones have their own
clear ideas about how smart phones should operate and what they should contain, but newcomers have ample means and encouragement to introduce different concepts - the industry is ready to accept new ideas

Free-flowing: The success of a company in the smart phone industry is
substantially determined by its skills with innovation, technology, marketing, and operations, rather than any restrictive contractual lock-ins or accidents of location or history. Foreseeing the benefits of an open approach to smart phone development, the mobile phone industry came together to create Symbian, eight years ago. The name "Symbian" is derived from the biological term "symbiosis", emphasising the positive aspects of collaboration. It's no surprise that the vast majority of today's smart phones utilise Symbian OS.

The volumes of smart phones in circulation are already large enough to
trigger a tipping point - more and more industry players, across diverse
fields, are choosing Symbian OS to deploy their new solutions. And at the same time as manufacturers are learning how to provide smart phone solutions ever more affordably, users are learning (and then sharing) surprising new ways in which they can take advantage of the inner capability and productivity of their smart phones. People who presently think their needs are well met by feature phones will soon realise that their needs will met even more fully and more widely by smart phones. It's a powerful virtuous cycle. That's the reason why each new generation of smart phone products has a wider appeal.