Peroon is probably best known for its porting product S2U that allows a single Series 60 Platform application source to be converted for use on UIQ devices. Since it became available for free S2U has been downloaded over 8000 times, according to Dan Amir, Peroon's CEO, and has been used to port over 120 applications. "It is possible that S2U has been responsible for making many more applications available on UIQ and other platforms," says Dan, "120 is just the number we know about." Peroon made S2U available as a free download as part of an arrangement with "a major player in the Symbian OS ecosystem".

While its porting products are the most well known face of Peroon they have also been offering development and integration services for some time, but have now set up a Symbian OS Development Centre to better serve a growing clientele.

"We are very well placed here in Israel," says Dan. "There is a strong semi-conductor industry with a demand for Symbian OS experts to help them with their low level programming requirements. While these companies could have looked to Europe, and the likes of Digia or Teleca, we were able to offer more cost effective and timely services." This early work helped Peroon gain valuable experience in base porting, OS kernel porting and device drivers right the way through to commercial grade user applications, all of which has helped it to grow into increasingly larger projects. "The next logical step in growing these services was to establish an R&D centre," says Dan. Peroon is now hoping to grow out of the domestic market and garner clients worldwide for its mobile development and integration services. Dan sees one of Peroon's advantages in achieving this as the fact it is not a large company, with lower overheads, meaning it can offer "a very interesting business proposition" as Dan puts it.

Offering such a broad range of services has also meant forming specific teams around certain disciplines. "Those developers who work with embedded systems and are familiar with low level programming very often don't want to develop applications and vice versa," says Dan. "So we have two main groups in the R&D centre, one focusing on the application side and the other on the low level development."

Peroon's work offers it an insight into the technologies which will be powering Symbian OS smartphones months or even years from now. "In terms of hardware we are seeing some interesting new processors emerging," says Dan. "These will offer much more processing capacity, are easier to work with and offer a single chip approach, which will bring device costs down. In terms of application trends we are seeing a strong interest and growth in WI-FI, VoIP, video telephony and PoC."

Dan is positive about the growth Peroon can achieve with its R&D centre, noting that "more and more companies are getting involved with Symbian OS".

In addition to the Symbian OS R&D centre Peroon has recently acquired capabilities in hardware design and testing. Most of the hardware design work however is outside the Symbian OS space. "We are working with Linux and WinCE," says Dan. "And we are doing some very interesting stuff with hardware." Even so, Symbian OS however does not figure in current plans for Peroon's hardware competencies. "We don't include Symbian OS hardware design simply because Symbian only licenses to smart phone manufactures," says Dan. "These companies do most of the design work themselves, so there is less of a market for us."

Symbian OS licensing is also a hurdle to Peroon using the OS for other projects. "Symbian is very focused on licensing their OS on to phone manufactures," says Dan. "As a result they won't license to create other types of devices. If they decide to change this strategy I am sure we would see many other uses of the operating system. I think dramatic things could happen if Symbian decides to license the operating system as an embedded operating system for any application, not only for smartphones."

So why would Dan like to see the Symbian OS available for other, non-phone devices? "Because in many cases Symbian OS is a better operating system," says Dan. "Each project is different, but the performance, the capabilities of Symbian OS would be the right solution in many cases. We certainly have had projects where Symbian OS could have been a very interesting choice, possibly the best choice for the customer."

So is Symbian missing an opportunity? "I am sure it is," says Dan. "But I'm not sure that from Symbian's perspective they should do it today, or a year from now, but I am sure that at some time in the future there is a huge market waiting for embedded open Operating systems like Symbian OS."

For more information on Peroon can be found at its website: www.peroon.co.il.