On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Christian Pühringer <cip(a)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 The S40 itself, was planned to be superseded by another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
[
1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40
[
2]http://ncomprod.nokia.com/nokia-asha-smarter-mobile-phones
[
3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nokia_products#Nokia_Asha_series
[
4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_share