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Twice the delegates for Symbian, a week after the Microsoft show

Today and tomorrow, the Symbian Developer Expo will be taking place in London's Excel conference and exhibition centre in Docklands - and it looks like it will get twice the number of developer delegates that Microsoft got last week - as you might expect.

It would be wrong to look at Symbian as an offshoot of Psion, or to look at the Compact Edition of Microsoft .Net as another incarnation of PocketPC Windows. Both viewpoints are, strictly, quite correct; but this isn't where things are moving, and the real competition is for the hearts and minds of the mobile community.

The Microsoft Developer Conference was, in fact, astonishingly well attended, given the newness of what is behind it. Sure; the PocketPC and Windows CE are not brand new, nor are they yet what they need to be; but they are now seen as a genuine alternative.

There's a feeling, amongst a lot of developers, that they don't want to be sucked into a religious war between supporters of Java, Symbian and Windows.

Java remains a "must-have" technology. However much Microsoft protests, it's clear that it badly wants Java to fail. It says that it just wants .Net to succeed; but there are too many straws in the wind pointing to simple corporate rivalry, and fierce competitive hostility. For example, this week's rumours from the Nine States monopoly trials included top-level evidence from AMD which said that Microsoft tried to do a deal with Intel to break Java.

The rumour can't be right; indeed, it's hard to know how you could break Java, and there are a lot of people who'd have your guts for garters if you tried it - they are dependent on it as a standard.

But there's also an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Java, which some say is only a highest common factor of all the available features; it just includes a small subset of what people want to do, and all the other extensions are created by other people, without regard for standards. They say Java is now seen as playing "catch-up" as it attempts to get rid of the albatross around its neck, in the form of a lot of independent, incompatible implementations of what .Net and Symbian have been able to provide from scratch.

For these people, the question is: "Which to go for?"

Symbian has the momentum; it has Nokia and Ericsson and several other phone makers firmly tied into its plans and strategies. Psion, which originally launched it, may have pulled out of competition with Microsoft in the mobile hardware business, but the new Symbian platform is being supported by people at least as big and powerful as the Compaq and HP and other supporters of Windows on hand-held computers.

But the other side of the picture shows an interesting view of the same scene; there, Symbian is seen as a tool of dominance by the big telcos and phone operators.

At the Microsoft developers' conference last week, all delegate places were taken, and 1,000 pretty high-level techies showed up to a full session of seminars looking at pretty detailed inside info on how-to and road-map and what's-wrong chest-baring from some pretty senior Microsoft executives - including one ex-Psion VP. It's fair to say it went well beyond Microsoft's hopes for the show (or they'd probably have booked it into a rather nicer hotel than the ghastly Hilton Metropole!).

This week, at least 1,500 delegates are due to show up for Symbian; hopes are that 2,000 may join in over the two-day event. It will be fascinating to see whether the trend is equally buoyant there.

There's no reason to say that either technology has to "win" - and no reason to suggest that if one succeeds, the other can't. But if they both survive and prosper, they will diverge in their directions.

This week may give us important clues as to which way they are heading.