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Symbian's product is a low-power, high-performance operating system called EPOC, originally designed for pocket computers. Eyeing the convergence between computing and mobile telephony, Symbian hopes EPOC will be the system of choice to power computer gadgets of all sizes and types, from smart phones to advanced wireless information devices. Elegant and lean, EPOC is so far primarily known through Psion's series 5 and 5mx PDAs. Because of that, people often think of Symbian as a competitor to Palm and other handhelds, such as Microsoft's just-released Pocket PC. But Symbian's strategy is really fixed firmly on the mobile phone market. EPOC-based mobile phones are expected to start appearing within a few months.

Americans are often astonished that someone buying a mobile phone in London can be assured that the phone will work in the remotest corner of Italy while his American counterpart is still trying to get through the fine print on roaming agreements. Because mobile phones are so popular -- by the end of 2000, there will be 30 million of them in the United Kingdom alone -- and because the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) means that new phones can browse the Web and take advantage of specially tailored data services, many believe the wireless Web will quickly overtake the PC-based Web, at least in Europe.

Unfortunately, Europe and the United States have different, incompatible standards for mobile telephony. The current European digital standard, GSM (for Global System for Mobile Communications), is limited to 9600bps and 160 characters per message -- clearly inadequate for general Internet use. But GPRS (for General Packet Radio Services) is expected to change all that when it starts rolling out later this year. The difference is similar to that between traditional telephone networks and the Internet: circuit switching vs. packet switching. The result should be an explosion of mobile-phone-based Internet access.

There's a rumor among the British technical press that EPOC stands for "Electronic Piece of Cheese." Is that true?

That was an acronym that they backfitted. You know how if something's cheesy ... in this case, the hardware engineers had taken to using the word that if something was going smoothly, it was going like a piece of cheese. Don't ask me why. So it became in the culture for a while that something that was akin to a piece of cheese was like a piece of cake -- it was going very well, very smoothly. So electronic piece of cheese just meant a great piece of software. But EPOC stands for epoch, and nothing else.

Is it an advantage or disadvantage to be in Europe, far away from Silicon Valley?

Over the years, our greatest advantage is that we haven't been in Silicon Valley -- and also our greatest disadvantage. In terms of the resources and people we can get our hands on, it's fantastically useful to be where we are. In Silicon Valley, it's very difficult to recruit and run professional development at this stage. In the telecom world, Europe is ahead, and that's very valuable to us because we've been able to focus on the wireless industry and get a head start over the U.S.

Why is wireless so far ahead in Europe?

Partly cultural. GSM was set up from the cultural model of getting the benefit to the user instead of the person who supplied it. America's [model] is very much the O.K. Corral model of business -- we'll all go down to the O.K. Corral and start shooting each other, and whoever's left standing is the winner. This isn't very good in the communications world. You have to agree to cooperate on standards before you start shooting everybody. There's also the cultural issue of the caller pays. The whole non-U.S. world is unified on that issue, and everything else follows from it. On the other hand, Americans don't pay for local calls, which we do, so you have all these pagers in the U.S. ...

When commerce begins to drive change, I don't think the U.S. will stay behind. If you just look back to when we formed Symbian in June 1998, people really did not understand wireless. In just 20 months, that has changed so significantly. Many people in America get it now.

Next page | A market that makes the millions of Palm users look like small change