More from FPs roving reporter, Thom Hopper, at Orange Code Camp in Opio:

"Today has been long and has had a greater number of sessions than yesterday, or for that matter tomorrow. Saw a lot of cool stuff and managed to glean myself a free Sony Ericsson K600i which is still making me drool, and I have had my SIM in it for almost an hour now. We have no Sudoku for it so I will sort that out when i get back.

Key points:

Symbian, lets not go there. It seems that symbian across multiple devices is not a good thing. For a single customer who needs external hardware to replace, say, an expensive custom device, eg; barcode scanner, then Series 60 (i.e. Symbian on a single target handset) would be a good idea, for mass market products then Java seems to b the way to go, but think we all knew that already. The Symbian signed process for Symbian 9 which i wont go into here seems to be a direct attempt to shaft the independent developer along with the malware developer at the same time. You need to buy a key from somone before you can even submit your apps to
be tested (which costs money).

USIM

The nice people at Gemplus tell me that the future aplications will be installed on the SIM (for which memory will range up to 1 gig). I see this being a wonderful thing for DRM and cirtification but not for any real user applications. I could be wrong on that, it does make it easy to update an app using text messaging for example. Midlets on the handset can communicate with the sim using JSR 177, this could be where the future of SIM apps lies.

I have gleaned contact details from a few people, but key people are:

Savaje. mobile handsets with pure Java environment so: multitasking OS with inherent multi-midlet support. Exact JSR implementations including 177 and 3D, PIM etc.

A guy from a testing company: they do Java verified in the UK, but they are 'all about the Orange'. This means that when Orange start their own signing process for products to be come 'Orange compatible' they do the two in one, making the proces
cheaper.

Cool stuff: net beans designer thing for graphical constuction of midlet interfaces, I can only asume with LCDUI. I have it on cd.

P.S. Point of interest: less biscuits with 'nice' writen on them than previously expected."

Motorola roks iPod's boat: "it integrated new R&D teams in Europe and Asia to cater for platforms such as i-mode"

I think we're going to see a lot more of this sort of integration.

3 plans to sell advertising on mobiles: ""We are not a telco, we are not a media company, we are not a technology company; our business is radically different because we are all three.""

From FP's man on the ground, Thom Hopper:

"All across the opening pow wow was the Orange Home Screen. It looks like they are producing several versions of it, with differing numbers of icons and features with different graphics for different 'peoples'. They seem to want to configure your phone to give you everything you could want on the home screen, being you a housewife with just three icons or a business person with 8 or so. This is speculation and has been inferred from several things I've seen today but the Orange signature devices with the home screen (Series 60, SPV etc) seem to be what its all about.

There's talk of open platforms, they had a picture of the SPV with the words 'open platform' below it in large letters - they seem to be all about the openness. They even went as far as to say there platforms of choice were (and i quote) "Symbian and Series 60, Windows Mobile and 'hopefully' Linux".

Not quite balls out or anything but they seem to want to associate themselves with Linux 'a bit'. That was the last that was mentioned of it.

Heard about gemplus, people doing large ammounts of storage on simcards, there's a JSR to do somthing with it. I dont really know about it, I will go to one of the seminars tomorow.

Orange's live TV service: average user watches 40 minutes per month.

3G customers use 5 times the data, (data services) than 2G customers.

'Try and buy' and 'convergence servies' were mentioned but not elaborated upon, i think they were running out of time.

Business

There will be lots of stuff on B2B and the Orange roadmap and partner program over the next few days. "Orange think of businesses as end users rather than cold companies".

Orange is good because: they are number 1 in france and number 2 in england for business; their brand is strong, convergence (again?); email and PIM is now non business stuff and they want new business apps.

Also m2m they want in on. All business apps need to be collaborative. They want apps that combine voice and data on 3G.

Sponsors
Symbian: Eclipse tools are free now; there's an affiliate programme; but Symbian signed oh no!

UIQ: new free tools, working with Symbian, Orange developers get early access.

Sony Ericsson: have a new WiFi smartphone, they think the new security in Symbian will encourage police and more serious business use. They think java is key. On-device debugging?

Forum Nokia: learning institute is what they are talking about; SIP SIP SIP; evolution of application delivery; web java download; portal presence for Symbian apps."

ID scheme to check 13 biometrics: "presumably the borderline between free democracy and police state lies somewhere between the hours of 4am and 5.30am"