On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Christian Pühringer <cip@gmx.at> wrote:
I think you are mixing up Symbian and S40/Asha. Both platforms have very significant market share in the developing world.
Supporting offline wikipedia on Symbian is not an issue. One example is WikiOnBoard, but
actually offline Wikipedia is usable on Symbian since about 2003.
However, supporting offline WIkipedia on S40/Asha is challenging. I believe that this is not really due to hardware limitations,
but rather because apps must be implemented in Java (J2ME) and cannot use native code.
Note that for a similar reason it may be difficult to support offline wikipedia on some higher-end platforms such as windows phone.
Hi
I believe you are conflating a couple of things yourself. First, S40 is the platform [1], Asha is a series of phones using S40, targeting the developing markets[2]. Asha series was released in Q4 of 2011[3], so they are fairly new in the market. On a side-note, Asha is also the Hindi word for 'hope'.
Now, for nomenclatures of smart phones; in several descriptions, S40 is not treated as a smartphone, it is technically marketed as a "feature phone". Mobile market share distributions, usually omit S40 as a smartphone platform[4]. The S40 itself, was planned to be superseded by another short-term platform from Nokia. To the best of my knowledge, S40 was designed to be a simpler platform than S60/Symbian, it does not have a native code API for third parties and thus, does not support installable applications beyond MIDlets, written in Java. They are usually restricted to much smaller screens. To reiterate it was designed not to support installable apps and be a basic, simpler alternative to S60. And I'm quiet certain those same limitation will not affect the windows phone. :)
The problem with Symbian in the developing world is not the platform itself, but the fragmentation and the hardware. In order to cut costs, they are rarely designed with applications and future expansion in mind. The infrastructure and the access are another thing, that doesn't help the situation much but that is another rant for another time. ;)
Regards
Theo