Orange Code Camp Europe was held at a Club Med resort in Opio, France on October 17-19, 2005. Orange brought together mobile application developers, game publishers, content providers, device manufacturers and operating system providers to stimulate the creation of new and exciting mobile applications. Providing sleeping bags and 24-hour food for all the campers, this was one of the busiest developers' bashes of the year with 400-450 developers attending.

The Orange brand is estimated to be worth 7.8 billion dollars and Orange is the biggest operator in France and second largest in the UK after Vodafone. Orange will soon be opening a new Developer Center in Beijing, China, and the Code Camps in Europe in the fall and in the US in the spring show Orange's commitment to promoting and forging stronger relationships with key development companies. Sony Ericsson was Gold sponsor of this year's European Code Camp event together with UIQ Technology. The first day of the Code Camp started off with an opening PowWow which included several Orange speakers.

Code Camp visitors learned that 3G users consume five times more data downloads than 2.5G users. Orange has a clear aim to combine voice and data on its 3G network and at the event scouted for applications in the areas of Communications, Entertainment, Productivity tools and Converged services to help drive this trend. They stated that business applications need to be collaborative. Orange is also growing more interest in M2M (machine-to-machine communications).

Some example statistics from Orange's services included 10,000 full music tracks and 50,000 games downloaded per week from their portal. The average user of their Live TV services consumes around 40 minutes per month. Orange mentioned the Star Wars campaign as one of their most successful campaigns ever, including THQ games, ringtones, themes, download of trailer and personal avatars.

Panel session Sony Ericsson's Ulf Wretling, Director & Head of Content Development, participated in a panel session on the first day, and highlighted Sony Ericsson's commitment to Symbian OS, UIQ and Java ME as open platforms for applications and content development. Both Symbian OS and Java ME have now become mature as applications platforms, allowing increasingly advanced applications to run on mobile phones. Ulf explained the need for the unified and industry-endorsed testing and certification programs Symbian Signed and JavaVerified, and was then asked three main questions as part of the panel: 1. What's the main news with the new P990 smartphone, which Sony Ericsson announced just a week ago? Ulf answered by mentioning 3G UMTS and WiFi for connectivity, more Java capabilities than on the P910, the support for both CDC and CLDC environments, and the possibility to access thousands of Java applications thanks to now being able to run Java in both flip open and flip closed mode on the phone.

"The Symbian OS is now a mature platform deployed in very advanced handsets used by increasingly skilled software and solution developers. Symbian OS v9 introduces an enhanced security model that provides controlled access to sensitive API's. In order to further build trust among carriers and consumers and eliminate the risk of installing malware or at least limiting the potential damage caused by an unsigned application, Developer Certificates are needed to access restricted API's with certain access to sensitive functionality in Symbian OS. Network operators have driven this change, for the benefit of their customers. The introduction of DevCerts also allows us to in a controlled and secure way give access to certain API's that were previously undocumented and therefore not accessible," Ulf explained.

Benefits of the new UIQ software platform for the consumer include extensive personalization possibilities, a rich user experience and ease of use. According to Ulf, the user needs fewer clicks to perform a task and is able to perform several tasks in parallel, for example browsing and synchronizing e-mails or being engaged in a video telephony call at the same time. For the developer this multi-tasking functionality means allowing you to have multiple PDPs open at the same time. The new task manager in UIQ 3 allows you to switch between applications without closing the application, for example you can have browser, mail and calendar open at the same time, and copy and paste between them.

3. What's your view on Java and its importance for entry to mid-end phones? Here, Ulf described how the Java ME Platform has matured from being used primarily for gaming to also allowing business and productivity applications on mobile phones thanks to a number of new JSRs. Ulf also mentioned the development from 2D gaming to more advanced 3D gaming.

"To date, Sony Ericsson has 21 phones supporting Mobile Java 3D, from entry-level to high-end, currently the widest range of 3D-enabled GSM/UMTS phones among handset manufacturers on the market. Sony Ericsson Developer World has for the past 18 months been driving the adoption and education of Mobile Java 3D through various development initiatives, having led to significant interest and uptake of this emerging technology among operators, developers and consumers," Ulf said.

Workshop sessions
Sony Ericsson had two speaker sessions in the main program:

• "Sony Ericsson and NetBeans: living up to developers' expectations" by Thomas Bailey, Tools Product Manager, Sony Ericsson Developer World & Petr Suchomel, Software Engineer from Sun Microsystems, provided the J2ME application basics. Details on layouts with the Mobile Visual Designer were shared as well as optimization of applications for different devices. The presentation also covered the production of JARs and JADs for each target, deployment of applications via Bluetooth and on-device debugging.
•  Download presentation>>

• "Developing for the P990" by Mark Donohoe, Senior Software Engineer at Sony Ericsson, covered the key features of the new Sony Ericsson UMTS smartphone and developer APIs.
•  Download presentation>>

Phone raffle
Orange held a phone raffle which was probably the most appreciated activity during the event. Huge focus was put on Sony Ericsson since Orange chose to raffle 40 Sony Ericsson phones. It was a crazy experience with people hanging over Sony Ericsson representatives' shoulders, begging for a K750 or a K600.
 
Sony Ericsson meeting developers
The Sony Ericsson booth in the 'Meet and Greet' area was a good place to do business. Developers presented many interesting applications and approached Sony Ericsson with focused questions on e.g. SVG, Flash Lite, Java ME and Symbian OS. And of course people wanted to see and feel our latest phones.

Each booth also had a fun fair game. Sony Ericsson had a Jenga game which attracted the largest crowd.

All in all, the Orange Code Camp was an excellent opportunity to meet and discuss how the developer community can create useful, fun and innovative content and applications which can be combined with attractive phone features and offer key operator customers like Orange an attractive value proposition and consumers a rich multimedia experience.