A Symbian Client

One thing that troubles me is that developers pay attention only to iPhone and Android, Symbian is an afterthought or many a times Symbian is completely ignored, they don’t even acknowledge that there is a mobile platform called Symbian. Now why does Symbian need developers attention? – For completing the service experience. And what is service experience? It means that you should be able to enjoy the service like everyone is.

There are services like Groveshark, LastPass, Paypal, Last.fm, Spotify, Evernote, Dropbox etc. These services have mobile client also which makes life much more easier. But… But… they are not available for Symbian. I pay to use most of these services but I’m not getting the full benefit of it. The number of Symbian users are more than iPhone, Android, Palm and Windows mobile users combined.

These services and developers don’t realize that by embracing Nokia and Symbian they will be getting more new customers. And developing for Symbian is not hard, in fact Symbian gives you more options to choose from when building an app. For developing apps for android, you can use only higher/better version of java on the other hand on Symbian you can use QT, Python, C+ + and Java.

Some of the apps that I should mention are Gravity, Mobbler, the official WordPress app (early testing stage), TuneWiki, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Skyfire, ereader, SmartMovie, Midomi, Nimbuzz, Playlist DJ, Handy Apps, AccuWeather, Symtorrent, snaptu are some of the apps which are very good.

For the last two weeks I’ve been trying sending emails to customer care of various services demanding a Symbian client, telling them the benefits of having a Symbian client and threatening to quit the service if I don’t get a symbian client. ;p

Here are some of the responses I got -

1. Evernote – Evernote does have a Symbian client in the shape of a WRT widget. It is slow and clunky and has not been updated for months and customer service politely said – Sorry, we have no information about our Symbian plans.

2.LastPass – lastpass is a password management service and you get a symbian client with premium service which costs $1 a month. The symbian client is again very clunky and doesn’t work with touchscreen phones — They were concerned about my problem, wanted more information and assured me they will fix it soon.

3.Last.fm – We do have Mobbler and it is better than other clients, even the official ones. I want last.fm to acknowledge and include Mobbler is their official page. — sadly no response so far.

4.Paypal – It has a mobile site which doesn’t come close to the iPhone app experience, and as expected no response from paypal people.

5.Grooveshark – The music streaming service have me a nice reply – ” Thank you for the email. We are working on a Symbian mobile version as we speak. However, its in the early stages of development so there’s no release date yet. —- That’s ok, we can wait, as long as there is something in the pipes.

Next I’ll be knocking the doors of Dropbox and many ebook services. So stay tuned.

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