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Symbian Expo opens for submissions

Speak now or forever... bugger off to Apple?

The Symbian Expo is off to Amsterdam on 10 November, and is asking those interested in saying a few words to register in the next couple of weeks or risk missing the opportunity.

Not that attendees have had much time to plan - the date and venue were announced less than two weeks ago, less than four months before the event itself. Now aspiring presenters have only a couple of weeks to choose a category, pick a subject, and put together an abstract, ready to present it to the assembled crowd three months hence.

Quite how big that crowd will be is open to debate: much of the community developing Symbian applications has been seduced by Apple's promise of easy riches and abandoned the platform. The Symbian Foundation (custodians of the now-open-source OS) points out that 27 million Symbian devices were shipped in the second quarter of 2020, nearly 300,000 a day, which has got to be a significant market in anyone's book.

Except that most Symbian users don't even know they can download applications, despite Nokia's efforts to push Ovi as the default application (and everything else) store. Symbian Horizon will address that to some extent, providing an easy way for network operators to offer verified Symbian applications with the minimum of effort, but it's hard to compete with such high-profile competitors.

But while Android and the iPhone get all the attention, Symbian is still the dominant smartphone platform by a huge margin, and one with enormous potential if all those Symbian users can be encouraged to buy an application or two. If you've any idea how to achieve that, you should probably sign yourself up. ®

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