On six consecutive Symbian Developer Days in the US, Germany, France, Spain and the UK, developers have learned the latest from the Symbian eco system.

Read the article with the experiences from the first five events>>

Last week, the last of the Symbian Developer Days that Sony Ericsson was sponsoring this fall was held in Manchester. One of the keynote speeches was delivered by Richard Hanscott, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at Orange, who opened his keynote by saying that "Orange likes to contribute to conferences like this because we are confident in the future."

Symbian and Java are critical for Orange as they move forward. Orange does not think there exists one killer application, but rather talks about the killer environment. Orange has about 50 million subscribers today. Most subscribers only use 20% of what a phone is capable of, and 80% of the people over 40 years old has never even sent an SMS. Richard sees a need to change the way Orange works and inspire people to change their behavior. 

Orange works with what they call signature phones and has increased its focus on smartphones in Europe. Orange trusts they will see a fast take-up of Symbian development and applications among their services. They just launched the Sony Ericsson P900 in the UK market, and promoted their Video Messaging service at the Symbian Developer Day in Manchester.

"Clearly we believe that this style of product [the Sony Ericsson P900] will be very successful in the future," Richard said.

"Simple, compelling and personalized" are the key features of successful applications, and necessary components of creating the killer environment. "Epic times are ahead of us," Richard ended his keynote.

Also at this last event, Sony Ericsson gave a keynote presentation and addressed the interest from developers in Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the Entertainment track.

Jo Stichbury, Principal Software Engineer, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, giving a presentation about "Mobile Multimedia and DRM" in Manchester.

Attached you will find Sony Ericsson's presentations at these events:

Speaker topic	Presentation
Sony Ericsson keynote - 1.7 MB
Branded Content and DRM (first 5 events) - 4.8 MB
Mobile Multimedia and DRM (Manchester) - 4.3 MB

The speaking companies also exhibited their latest products and technologies. Sony Ericsson offered developers Tech Support Live and demonstrated on-device debugging of C++ applications on the P900.

Anders Storm, Senior Project Manager, Sony Ericsson Smartphones, gives a P900 demo to Carl Taylor from Adepteo.