Symbian's second 10 years

My friend, client and soon to be co-author David Wood has started a blog. (I warned David about blogging as a productivity destroyer, but he’s gone ahead anyway).

The blog is not one in his official capacity as executive VP for research at Symbian, but obviously it’s influenced by his work as the only remaining Symbian executive founder (and many years with Psion before that). One of his first articles (posted Monday) is entitled “Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation.”

David reminisces a little about the first 10 years (Symbian was founded in June 1998) but it’s not primarily about that. The company has a slick official 10th birthday site. I half expected Andrew Orlowski of the The Register to a Symbian retrospective, but I guess he burned out with last year’s long feature on Psion’s last great product, the Series 5 PDA.

Instead — as the lead researcher of an IT company should do — David looks forward. Here are some key smartphone trends he predicts:

• Component prices will continue to fall.
• Quality, performance, and robustness will continue to improve.
• Users will discover that phones can do more than just phone calls and SMS.
• The smartphone ecosystem will to innovate in new services
• Even cooler smartphones will come out

I’m not going to try to summarize the entire posting, because it’s easy enough to read here.

David’s blog is added to the blogroll on the right: a list of people I know personally whose occasional postings I find insightful. So far, I have decided as a matter of policy to omit those who seem to be full-time bloggers — if for no other reason that competing with them would cause me to spend even more time blogging.