Team Blog

Shaun McGill of PDA247 emailed us, curious to know if our appearance at the UIQ Developer Fast Track conference signified something of a change of strategy. It's a good question, and now that we're back home I thought it would be good say a bit about what we're thinking.

For a long time we've kept saying to people who ask that we're looking into Symbian and may do something "in the next 6 to 12 months", but to the outside world nothing really happened . We have kept things under review for a long time, but until this year we've felt that we needed to keep focussed on our existing customers who own Palm OS and Windows Mobile-based phones and PDAs. We can only do so many things at once! There have also been technical and market reasons why we've not looked at Symbian: porting to the older versions of the Symbian OS was expensive for us to do, plus there didn't seem to be a large enough market for Symbian games (rather than Java games - we don't do those).

Happily these issues seem to be looking much less of a problem in S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 (both based on Symbian OS v9), which is why we're taking another look. For instance, more and more of Nokia's phones are powered by S60, and Sony Ericsson's new M600 and Walkman W950 phones look exciting too .

So what does that all mean? Initially I think it's likely that we will be releasing a small number of games on the Symbian platforms next year, and we'll be using them to get a better feel of which titles from of our complete games catalogue we should port across.