From FP's man on the ground, Thom Hopper:

"All across the opening pow wow was the Orange Home Screen. It looks like they are producing several versions of it, with differing numbers of icons and features with different graphics for different 'peoples'. They seem to want to configure your phone to give you everything you could want on the home screen, being you a housewife with just three icons or a business person with 8 or so. This is speculation and has been inferred from several things I've seen today but the Orange signature devices with the home screen (Series 60, SPV etc) seem to be what its all about.

There's talk of open platforms, they had a picture of the SPV with the words 'open platform' below it in large letters - they seem to be all about the openness. They even went as far as to say there platforms of choice were (and i quote) "Symbian and Series 60, Windows Mobile and 'hopefully' Linux".

Not quite balls out or anything but they seem to want to associate themselves with Linux 'a bit'. That was the last that was mentioned of it.

Heard about gemplus, people doing large ammounts of storage on simcards, there's a JSR to do somthing with it. I dont really know about it, I will go to one of the seminars tomorow.

Orange's live TV service: average user watches 40 minutes per month.

3G customers use 5 times the data, (data services) than 2G customers.

'Try and buy' and 'convergence servies' were mentioned but not elaborated upon, i think they were running out of time.

Business

There will be lots of stuff on B2B and the Orange roadmap and partner program over the next few days. "Orange think of businesses as end users rather than cold companies".

Orange is good because: they are number 1 in france and number 2 in england for business; their brand is strong, convergence (again?); email and PIM is now non business stuff and they want new business apps.

Also m2m they want in on. All business apps need to be collaborative. They want apps that combine voice and data on 3G.

Sponsors
Symbian: Eclipse tools are free now; there's an affiliate programme; but Symbian signed oh no!

UIQ: new free tools, working with Symbian, Orange developers get early access.

Sony Ericsson: have a new WiFi smartphone, they think the new security in Symbian will encourage police and more serious business use. They think java is key. On-device debugging?

Forum Nokia: learning institute is what they are talking about; SIP SIP SIP; evolution of application delivery; web java download; portal presence for Symbian apps."