Symbian for Software Leaders: Principles of Successful Smartphone Development Projects

Chapter 19. Designing for longevity

Preparing for variants

If you're really lucky, your Symbian OS smartphone product will be a great success, and many millions of users will purchase your software.

More realistically, your product won't get everything quite right. It will appeal to lots of users, but many other users will remain relatively cool to it. You'll satisfy some customer requirements, but you'll leave other customer requirements unmet.

You should foresee that kind of outcome to your project, and plan ahead for it. That is, you should be planning follow-up projects, even while you are still in the midst of an existing project. Plan to build on the software for the existing project, by making innovative additions and changes, to boost your market share.

Actually, even if you are really lucky, and your initial product hits the jackpot of widespread acclaim, you should still be planning to create variants. Even in this situation, you can boost your sales even further by smart differentiation into new market segments. So, both in the situations of modest success and stunning success, you should be considering variants – variants such as:

• Geographical variants (Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Hindi, US, etc.)

• Different industrial designs (novel keypads, sliders, folders, rotators, etc.)

• Different peripherals (attachable full-size keyboard, GPS tracking system, additional data storage, biometric sensors, etc.)

• Variants for youth or sports markets, or with celebrity endorsement or joint marketing ...