As is normal for me, I spent only a morning at the Symbian Smartphone Show. I tend to skip most of the keynotes, which can be vapid, and hit the
vendors exhibitors I need to talk to.

This year I wanted to catch up with...

• Opera, and their platform. Looks like with Opera 9, sometime in 2007, we'll have off-line widgets which can embed themselves in the OS as native-looking applications.


• Google, to see how they built and tested their wonderful wonderful mobile maps application. I guess it was asking too much to see if they had solved the problems of testing mobile applications since last month :-) but it was a great opportunity to have a chat with them about the application.


• Sybase, to get a grip on their Anywhere range of products. I've had a long-standing "to do" item to look into what Sybase are offering. The two main product areas I'm interested in are M-Business Anywhere and SQL Anywhere. Unfortunately, they weren't pushing them at the show, so I was only able to get a rough overview. Still that's more than I knew before I went.

The photo, above, is from the one keynote I did sit in on: "Google in the Mobile World" by Alan Eustace. Mobile advertising, click-to-call adverts, and of course mobile search were the main topics. Interesting to note that users enter on average 2.3 words per search on mobile, which is the same as on the desktop. I'd have expected it to be less for mobile, but for no good reason. If you find that kind of thing interesting, there's a PDF study that goes into more detail.

Update 2006-10-23: The Register comments on some of the Mobile Web 2.0 presentations I didn't get chance to attend.