Talk to the people at Symbian - the mobile operating system company, once controlled by Nokia, more recently turned into a non-profit organisation - and you have to have your wits about you. The conversation is soon a sea of acronyms - OpenGL ES, OpenWF, OpenCL, EGL... Pick between those technologies - respectively concerning mobile 3D graphics, mobile UI, parallel computing and the glue that links these with mobile operating systems - however, and some interesting trends start to emerge.

You see, Symbian's work tends to be obscured away within industry standards groups such as Khronos, as well as being highly technical, which is why it's helpful to have someone like the company's principal product manager, graphics and gaming, Bill Pinnell, to translate for you.

"We've been doing a lot of work on user interfaces recently," Pinnell explains, of the company's new ScreenPlay architecture. "We started out with a proprietary API, allowing you to blend media such as video, Flash, Java, native runtimes and games using hardware acceleration on the fly but now it's part of OpenWF. We expect it should be ratified by SIGGRAPH 2009. UI is becoming very important. It's driving the way hardware is integrated into mobile devices, especially in terms of power management and bandwidth utilisation."

So that's the graphics part of his job title covered. But before we get onto gaming, what's his view on Android, Google's mobile platform which feels quite Symbian, albeit with more of a consumer brand?

"Actually I think Android is more of a business brand," Pinnell muses. "People in the mobile business seem to think it's a consumer brand but I don't know if someone on the street would know what Android was."

And he definitely thinks the reorganised Symbian Foundation - that's the name for the non-profit organisation, which will offer its royalty-free, open mobile technology platform for license - will impress when it comes to integrating games into the wider trends of mobile technology.

"We have a much better story around gaming now because, in the past, Symbian gaming was hidden in the background: it was there but buried somewhere within the operating system. Now developers, middleware companies and ISVs want a more complete offering. With the Foundation, we have a big, meaty stack of user interface stuff - middleware, S60, plus the hardware abstraction, and the OS. I think that's a pretty good platform.

"Developers can use the Foundation suite, and their games will work on millions of devices and there's still plenty of room for the OEMs and service providers to differentiate themselves in terms of things like game delivery too. But we have a much better story in terms of getting games ported to the OS. I'd be happy to stand up at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco and say 'This is good platform for mobile gaming' and that's something I hope to be doing next year. We've solved the UI stuff. I want to get back into gaming."