Case Study: Translating the Oxford Spanish Dictionary 

Customer: Handmark  
Project Type: Complex Porting
Technologies: Port from Windows CE to Series 60 and UIQ 2

Product Overview

Handmark is the world’s number one software publisher for Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices. Handmark plans to extend this position into the Symbian OS market to become the world number one publisher of software for all ‘smart’ handheld mobile devices.

Handmark has a wide range of blue-chip partners for content, including Oxford University Press for Dictionaries. With history dating back to the 17th Century, OUP is the world’s largest and most prestigious university press publishing more than 4,500 books every year.

The Challenge

Handmark needed to offer its Oxford Spanish Dictionary product to the large Symbian OS market. It needed to ensure that the final product met the high quality and usability standards that customers have come to expect from Handmark and OUP products.

Objectives

  - Enable over-the-air content download to support devices with smaller memory
- Create an interface with strong branding and a great user experience
- Translate quality brand image into software

Method Deployed

Penrillian maximised the value of the existing Windows Mobile code. By analysing the code base, its expert porting team identified techniques to keep large parts of the code responsible for parsing and rendering the dictionary content in the Symbian version.

The new version required one substantial change from the existing software. The typical memory footprint of Symbian devices is smaller, meaning that not all of the dictionary data could be stored at the same time. To compensate, Penrillian added the capability for Over-The-Air (OTA) content downloads. Penrillian’s policy of incremental releases enabled the team to produce a robust OTA framework, even though they were working against an evolving protocol.

Handmark also benefited from Penrillian’s experience in designing products featuring Symbian’s UIQ user interface. This enabled Penrillian to create a strongly-branded OUP product while still following the UIQ guidelines.

As a Symbian Signing Authority, Penrillian was able to test and digitally sign the Oxford Spanish Dictionary application so that it can display the Symbian Signed (“for Symbian OS”) logo. This gives users confidence that they are buying a safe and reliable application; when installing, the user is told that the application is signed and trusted, distinguishing it from the many unsigned applications in the market.

Results

Penrillian helped Handmark to extend its reach in the smartphone market. The new Oxford Spanish Dictionary for Symbian OS combines a great user experience with a strong brand image; a great example of successful content translating to the mobile environment.

Download: Click here to download this case study in PDF format.