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Developing for Smartphone 2002
Matt Nicholson reviews the Orange SPV, and explains why Smartphone 2002 represents a very different proposition to Pocket PC 2002 for the software developer.
Author: Matt Nicholson
Last updated: Nov 2002
The
latest incarnation of Microsoft’s mobile platform, namely Smartphone
2002, was launched a few weeks ago, and since then I have been making
the acquaintance of an Orange SPV. This is the first Smartphone 2002 device
to appear on the UK market, and very nice it is too.
Its built-in GPRS connectivity allows it
to offer much the same functionality as a Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition
device such as the O2 XDA or HP’s Jornada 928 WDA, albeit through
a smaller screen and a one-handed T9 keyboard. As such it comes with Pocket
Outlook, including an integrated Inbox for not only email but also SMS
and voice mail as well; Pocket Internet Explorer, which supports both
HTML and WAP; Windows Media Player, for both audio and movies; and ActiveSync,
for synchronising with your desktop or with your Exchange server. It functions
well as a mobile phone too, supporting 900, 1800 and 1900 GSM and weighing
a very respectable 130 grams.
It also has a reasonable price tag at £170
including VAT if bought with a GPRS contract. Orange has come in with
an aggressive £6 a month unlimited data deal for the SPV (limited
only by a ‘fair use’ policy). How long Orange will sustain
this rate has yet to be seen – the company typically charges £15
a month for 5Mb and £3.50 for every additional 1Mb.
The SPV certainly cuts the mustard as an
executive toy. The display is bright and colourful, and surprisingly clear.
Web sites load quickly over GPRS, and I was pleasantly surprised by the
coverage in the UK. Watching movies with Windows Media Player proved to
be of novelty value only, but the device is very usable as a personal
organiser. The provision of Orange Backup, allowing you to back up your
personal data to servers hosted by Orange, is a masterstroke.
In the end there were just two areas that
disappointed. The first was battery life, which proved surprisingly short.
This is partly because the additional functionality means you tend to
use the device rather more than you would a conventional phone. However
I twice found the battery had gone flat within two days when left in standby
mode – rather less than the claimed 100 hours.
The SPV also managed to crash twice, and
in such a way that it could not respond to incoming calls, which was somewhat
disconcerting. One of these occasions was the result of Microsoft’s
insistence that the operating system should decide when to close an application,
rather than the user. I could actually hear the Rebound soundtrack go
into an endless loop as I switched over to Internet Explorer. Normal service
resumed only after I had removed and replaced the battery.
But the real strength of Smartphone 2002
is as a development platform, both for applications aimed at the consumer
market, and for the corporate market. Microsoft is already distributing
the Smartphone SDK which contains all you need to develop applications
for using eMbedded Visual C++ 3.0, including an emulator that runs the
Smartphone operating system compiled for the PC.
This is the same tool as you would use
to develop applications for the Pocket PC, and Microsoft is claiming that
porting an application from Pocket PC to Smartphone is only a few days
work. Furthermore, once the .NET Compact Framework becomes available for
the Smartphone platform you will be able to develop Smartphone applications
directly from Visual Studio .NET.
There certainly was quite a range of third-party
applications on display at the launch, and the developers we spoke to
all confirmed the ease of porting from Pocket PC to Smartphone. Nevertheless,
as a development platform, the Smartphone is a very different proposition
to the Pocket PC – not for technical reasons, but rather because
of the business model under which mobile phones operate.
Buy a Pocket PC and the choice of software
you install is down to you, and you alone. But in the world of the mobile
phone, device ownership is not so clear cut. As anyone who has lost an
uninsured phone is painfully aware, the cost of a contract phone is heavily
subsidised by the service provider. Furthermore, the last thing the service
provider wants is a whole lot of phones returned because some rogue third-party
application has rendered them unusable.
Smartphone 2002 supports a certificate-based
security system similar to Authenticode with security roles that include
not just the end-user and the administrator, but also the mobile service
provider and the manufacturer of the phone itself. Application loading
and execution is controlled by the security policy settings on the device.
There are two levels of trust here. Applications
signed with a certificate granting execution in Privileged mode have unhindered
access to all system resources. Aside from system patches, very few applications
should need this level of access. Most third-party applications will require
Unprivileged access which gives them restricted access to system resources.
Whether such applications require a certificate is up to the service provider.
If the service provider does decide to ‘lock’ its devices
then applications that are not signed with the appropriate certificate
may not even load. As Shreedhar Madhavapeddi of Microsoft’s Mobile
Devices Division put it, “It’s as if the mobile operator is
paying for your browser.”
This has a number of implications for the
software developer. First of all, you will need to obtain a developer
certificate from a company such as VeriSign or Baltimore Technologies,
which will cost around $500. Once this has been done, you will need to
convince the various service providers that your application is one they
want to allow on their mobile devices by issuing it with the appropriate
certificate. Furthermore, if each operator has a different policy, you
could end up going through this process several times.
This is good news for large corporates
whose concerns are similar to those of the operators themselves. Administrators
can work with their chosen service provider to ensure that the company’s
Smartphones are locked down to accept only specified applications. However
it’s more problematic for the smaller company, and for software
houses that are targeting the consumer market.
Microsoft is aware of the problem and is
working with the operators to streamline the process through its Mobile2Market initiative. The key here is the Designed for Windows for Smartphone logo
which is granted to applications that come up to scratch. Testing is carried
out by third parties such as QualityLogic and VeriTest and costs around
$600, although Microsoft is looking to subsidise this. Shreedhar told
us that testing should take less than a week and is covered by service-level
agreements with Microsoft.
Microsoft expects that most mobile service
providers will accept the Designed for Windows for Smartphone logo, and
not require further testing before issuing an operator certificate. Certainly,
if the operators want to see a healthy market for third-party applications,
it will be in their interests to do so. It is early days yet, but as Shreedhar
told us, “We are hoping most operators eventually go open on the
device.”
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