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February 12, 2008
Mobile SVG
Mobile SVG: A press release, in PDF: "Over 250 Million Ikivo Powered Mobile SVG Devices Shipped: Ikivo estimates that more than 375 million Mobile SVG devices are now deployed." That's a lot of webby mobile phones. With the Ikivo SVG Player 2.0 you're getting a known quantity, a predictable rendering of SVG-Tiny 1.2, with a known audience of 250 million devices, across different versions of this single player brand. That predictability reduces development, support and maintainence costs, and makes many projects possible. There's also a larger audience, people with different SVG brands, which should have very low porting costs for simple projects, reaching 375 million. That's significant. But -- and here's the odd part -- I had always assumed that the audience with some level of mobile SVG support was very very large, sort of like the situation with Java on mobile... different capabilities on different devices, but lots of devices with at least some capability. Then I read another press release, this time from Adobe: "With more than 450 million mobile devices powered by Flash shipped to date, and established partnerships with operators and handset manufacturers worldwide, Adobe's mobile solutions deliver engaging experiences across a wide range of handsets, mobile devices, networks and operating systems." That's a larger audience for a single-brand implementation of a much more ambitious specification. That's really significant. I don't know the stats as well as other people, but it seems like towards the end of last year there were 300 million Flash-enabled devices... gives credence to those lunchroom stories I've heard about the industry-wide move to richer interfaces after Apple introduced their iPhone, about the recent jump in demand from manufacturers and services. The problem we've always had in mobile is that the richer features require richer devices, but now it looks like Apple pushed the goalposts on everybody's expectations... helps SWF delivery on mobile overall. I'm still sort of shocked that there's far more Adobe Flash Lite out there than any implementation of W3c-style vector-drawing though. The richer capability has the wider audience... that's great news.
Posted by JohnDowdell at February 12, 2008 07:10 PM
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Comments
"That's a larger audience for a single-brand implementation"
Speaking of FlashLite brand surely it is, but Ikivo is SVG 1.2 Tiny compliant on every version, that means you can rely on SVG 1.2 Tiny content being reproduced correctly no matter the player version. When you break down the 400 millions (or whatever the lunchrooms say today) of FL players deployed into their relative version (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0) which are only backward compatible, the numbers are less impressive and there is a sense of non predactibility over possibility to deploy a FL based product owing to heavy fragmentation.
[jd sez: No. Read. The Ikivo press release says they've shipped 250M units. Not just their 2.0 release, but all their shipments. Same as the Flash Lite stats.]
Posted by: Emanuele Cipolloni at February 13, 2008 12:08 AM
Also keep in mind that SVG is also supported on newer JavaME devices with JSR-226 implementations. That said, I can't seem to find any recent stats on the number of actual devices shipping - the last updates are over a year old. I'd assume the numbers are likely to have increased at least a little.
JSR-226 SVG Wiki (updated 19.01.2007)
http://wiki.svg.org/index.php?title=JSR_226
JSR-226 SVG supported phones (updated 19.01.2007)
http://svg.org/special/226_phones
Posted by: Bryan Rieger at February 13, 2008 08:47 AM
One last thing - remember that JSR-226 has also been replaced by JSR-287.
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=287
Hmmm... navigating all of these JSR's does get a bit tiring, but it's not all that different from the various flavours of Flash Lite as Emanuele pointed out above.
Posted by: Bryan Rieger at February 13, 2008 08:57 AM
Since you are talking about all versions; and since all Nokia Series 40 or Series 60 phones (for example) have SVG Tiny either 1.1, 1.1+ or 1.2, the 350M estimate seems remarkably low.
[jd sez: Hi Chris! Ikivo's numbers may indeed be low; that's beyond my ability to estimate.]
Also, at the implementors panel at SVGOpen2007, Qualcomm announced shipping over 300M copies of their phones (with the BitFlash SVG 1.2 viewer). I'm getting more of an 800M value.
You are right though that the (flash-less) iPhone has turned heads and raised user interface expectations. The Motorola MotoRizr Z8 is one example which uses UIQ and SVG Tiny 1.2 for a similar user interface experience.
I guess multi-vendor, test-suite backed Open specifications win out over the proprietary single-vendor ones.
Posted by: Chris Lilley at February 13, 2008 10:46 PM