Another brainwave

Remember the Symbian ideas website? – http://ideas.symbian.org.

I’ve just posted another brilliant idea there, “Create an online Symbian virtual phone configurator”.

But something’s broken in the website. It throws away my formatting and turns my idea into one incomprehensible string.

So here it is the way it was meant to be.  If you like it, go and vote for it…

I suggest that we develop an online Symbian virtual phone configurator.  The idea is:

• I’m a Symbian developer, anybody from an amateur application developer to a network operator or handset maker.

• I want to have a device with certain characteristics as an early development and testing target, but I want it virtual, so I can integrate it with my PC hosted development environment – like the Symbian Emulator. I especially want it virtual if devices like the one I want aren’t yet on the market.

• I go to the Symbian Virtual Phone Configurator website and there I configure a device that meets my spec from a rich set of parameters, very much in the way that I can configure a car that I might like to buy at the manufacturer’s website (only more flexible than that).

• When I’ve finished configuring, the site builds a Syborg virtual ROM according to my spec, bundles it with virtual drivers according to my spec, and I download a virtual Syborg device of the kind I want that I can run as a QEMU virtual machine under Windows or Linux.

This is an idea for leveraging the breakthrough represented by Syborg. For less technical readers, Syborg is port of the Symbian kernel to run on the QEMU virtual machine manager. QEMU is open source hardware virtualisation solution that enables virtual ARM devices (such as virtual Symbian phones) to be created and hosted on a PC. With Syborg, those virtual Symbian phones can be built. The combination of Syborg and QEMU is on its way now to becoming Symbian’s standard development kit offering for PC hosted Symbian device emulation. This is a solution that allows a virtual Symbian device to be authentic right down to the ARM machine code, and that makes it a far more realistic target for development and testing than the venerable Symbian Emulator. The Emulator will be phased out of our development kits.

But another great merit of Syborg is the ease and flexibility it offers for specifying the characteristics of Syborg virtual devices. (Strictly this ease and flexibility comes from enhancements that the Syborg team have made to QEMU). It is this that makes it practical to offrer “pick ‘n’ mix” assembly of virtual Symbian devices as a web service.

An obvious refinement is that I can have an account on the site, store my device configurations and packages there, share out access to them.

Another is that I could code novel or superior virtual device drivers and contribute them to the site.

As of now, our development kits will be shipping with a prebuilt Syborg/QEMU ROM image included. This is a textshell ROM image, offering only a commandline interface to a rudimentary device. That’s all we are able to build for Syborg now, but as we enrich the platform we will be faced with burgeoning choices as to the spec of a virtual Symbian device that we ship, We could start shipping lots of different ones.

Better, I suggest, to enable the developers to specify the devices they’re interested in. Such a service could become an evolution lab for Symbian devices. And I think it would be a first of its kind – if we do it first.

Implementing this idea would be a substantial collaboration between our web developers, the Syborg team and build engineers, but  I do not think it presents profound technical challenges.