Wipro Ltd. is one of the largest independent research and development (R&D) services providers in the mobile market. It is headquartered in Bangalore, India, has more than 78,000 employees, and has revenues in excess of $3 billion. It is the third-largest information technology (IT) services company in India. Wipro also operates the only S60 Competence Center in India, and has years of experience in working with the leading players in the smartphone ecosystem.

Wipro has more than 300 corporate customers across the U.S., Europe, and Japan, including 50 of the Fortune 500 companies. It has a dedicated development center and offices across India, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

“We have been developing on the S60 platform from the very beginning,” says Ravi Kumar Srinivas Kalidindi, S60 Competence Center manager at Wipro Technologies, the IT arm of Wipro Ltd. “We have seen the platform evolve from S60 1st Edition to S60 3rd Edition, and we have seen all of the different versions of the SDKs and toolkits along the way. Besides developing a number of applications and utilities for our own purposes, we have also developed some off-the-shelf components that will reduce the cycle time for application development on S60 platforms by OEMs, operators, and other third-party application developers. We have already started to provide technical services and consultation to Forum Nokia PRO member companies on the latest revision of S60 3rd Edition.”

A long history of application development for S60 devices

In the earliest days of the S60 platform, Wipro developed several solutions for S60 1st Edition devices. These included a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) client application, a scalable vector graphics (SVG) engine, and a mobile ticketing framework. These solutions were showcased at many forums and expos worldwide.

As S60 2nd Edition and S60 3rd Edition came into existence, Wipro created more applications that took advantage of the new functionality offered by these editions. The company’s areas of development expertise for these editions included UI customization, theme development, UI scalability, device management, custom messaging plug-ins, tools for creation of platform UI layouts, and solutions based on Bluetooth wireless technology.

Wipro has also been extensively involved in various S60 phone programs for mobile device OEMs across different geographic regions. This includes functional areas such as building and integration; variant programs development and testing; and baseporting, drivers, and codec development on mobile chipsets used in various S60 phone programs.

S60 3rd Edition Development

Of course, S60 3rd Edition development is the focus of nearly all new application development for Wipro, and in this area, the company has completed in-house development of an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) framework for Symbian OS and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) stack that will help operators develop converged services. “We have also created a drive-time optimized UI solution and Web-based client applications based upon the S60 3rd Edition platform,” says Kalidindi. He also points to a multimedia slide show application that Wipro has recently developed using Open C and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology. “What makes this application stand apart is that, through the UPnP technology, the user can render the images and music onto separate UPnP devices. He or she can use the application as a universal controller, piping the music to a home audio system and the images to a TV display.”

VideoOnDemand Service

On the convergence theme, the company has also developed a VideoOnDemand application based on Wipro’s IMS client framework for S60 3rd Edition devices. This IMS application service enables a subscriber who is authorized to access a VideoOnDemand Service to select a catalog and from it a specific video clip to be streamed to the mobile device. The network-based mobile service created will also enable different charging modes for the content being accessed.

























Wipro’s VideoOnDemand application allows the user to select content from a catalog and stream it to an S60 3rd Edition device.

Collaboration between these services enables controlled sharing of video clip streaming with other mobile devices.

This network-assisted service is provided by an IMS client on the mobile device as well as an application service hosted on an IMS application server. Subscribers can share multiple types of media with one or more other mobile users in an interactive session. They can also interact with other users and take concurrence/acceptance before publishing content on an online album. The IMS-based service enables integration with existing online albums and it allows service providers to provide other value-added services.

Wipro compares the S60 3rd Edition SDK with previous editions

Kalidindi points out that not only has Wipro gained a great deal of S60 experience along the way, but the SDKs have also been dramatically improved as the platform has moved from one edition to another.

“In an earlier edition, we had difficulty building location-based services applications because the integration of mapping and navigation was difficult. Now we are finding that the [Mobile Location Framework (MLFW)] in the S60 3rd Edition SDK is quite handy,” says Kalidindi. In earlier editions, creating an application with Web browsing required a lot of programming to get the packet from the Web. “In that case, we built a custom control to manage all of the graphics, rendering, and error handling,” he says. Similarly, Wipro also built workarounds for some music APIs to implement sorting and searching features in a previous edition of the platform. “In the S60 3rd Edition SDK, there is the [Content Listing Framework (CLF)], which makes it much easier to list out all music albums, artists, and playlists,” says Kalidindi. “There is also now the Open C plug-in, which facilitates things like the LDAP protocol implementation porting.” In fact, Wipro ported the UPnP stack onto S60 3rd Edition using the Open C plug-in.

Wipro can help

“Being an S60 [Competence] Center has also helped us in gaining timely access to information about the S60 platform that has helped us in problem solving and also in the prioritizing of our competencies,” says Kalidindi. He ranks the competencies that Wipro can offer to OEMs, mobile operators, semi vendors, and third-party developers in the following ways: “Our S60 development focus is on differentiating UI and platform enabling for multimedia convergent services,” he says. “We offer consulting in the development of custom UI controls and content services for IP-based mobility solutions. Our offerings also include driver development and base porting, build and integration, application development and maintenance, as well as integration and validation services for S60-based devices and solutions.”