Am 18.04.2012 00:00, schrieb Theo10011:
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'.
Let's hope for an successor [1] of Asha which is more offline Wikipedia friendly :)
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 The S40 itself, was planned to be superseded by another short-term platform from Nokia.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. :)
I think we agree on that the challenge in supporting offline Wikipedia on S40 is less the hardware but more that only J2ME midlets are supported. AFAIK this leads to two main problems: 1. Slower than native code, which is mainly a problem for decompression. 2. Potential restrictions in handling of large files. At least when I looked into this last time, which was about 6 years ago, seeking was an issue.
Both points probably make it impossible to support standard zim files directly. Using a specially designed file format may solve this issues, but - besides being a lot more effort - 2. may be pretty challenging. Windows phone neither supports native code (only C#), thus it is probably affected by 1. while 2. should not be a problem. Thus while it is probably significantly easier to support windows phone than S40, it is still probable that standard zim files won't work well. Therefore significant additional effort to support offline wikipedia may be required on windows phone as well.
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. ;)
I disagree that fragmentation and limited expansion is a major issue for symbian support. For example wikionboard supports Symbian 3rd FP1, Symbian 5th and Symbian^3, which basically means that all symbian phones released since about end 2007 are supported [1]. In addition SDHC-card support is very common in Symbian phones. In difference for example to Windows Phone, only a few Symbian phones don't support SDHC cards.
For example in India [3] the most used phones in Nokia store according to [4] are 5233, 2700, 5130, X2-01, 5800: 2700 and 5130 are S40 with 2GB sd card maximum, X2-01 with 8GB sd card maximum [5]. 5233 and 5800 are Symbian 5th edition with SDHC support. I'm aware that this statistic is somewhat biased, because you need mobile internet or a PC with internet to download apps, but I believe it's sufficient to get an impression.
Best regards, Christian [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltemi_%28operating_system%29 [2] Supporting even older phones would be technically possible, but it's hardly worth the effort, because these could not be programmed with Qt, but only native symbian. [3] 20% of wikionboard downloads are from India, therefore I've used it in the example [4] http://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/Statistics.xhtml [5] According to nokia, I'd expect that this is SDHC and therefore 32GB