Symbian Signs on Samsung

mmol_6453 writes "In a move that beat Orange's showing off the first Microsoft-based smartphone by a day, Symbian has signed on Samsung. Quoth the article: 'Symbian now licenses its smartphone software to all five top mobile makers, and its OS has beaten both Palm and Microsoft in the European handheld device market'"

Comments

Not entirely related, but whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought I'd mention that Samsung is presently the electronics company I'm the happiest with...

I've got a few dozen Samsung monitors, LCD and CRT, all of which are great.. A Samsung cellphone which is also great, in addition to a couple low-end laser printers and a dvd player.

So far as I'm concerned, they're doing great in the 'decent, yet value-priced' category. Anyone disagree?

thanks

[djupedal]

I work for Samsung Electronics Company (Display Division R & D), and I'm happy to part of things. Thanks for the positive feedback. I'm sure SEC hopes for more of the same as new products come online.

Re:thanks

[waterwheel]

Yes, Samsung is doing a great job in the cost-effective market. Same thing - I'm running on their monitors and have lots of their printers around. And as soon as they get their all-in-one laser fax unit in Canada, I'll have one of those too. It's worth noting that Samsung's lasers have been coming out-of-the-box with linux drivers for quite a while now. This isn't something you see on most user-level printers, and it inspired a lot of confidence with me, knowing that it would be compatible in the future when I switch fully over to Linux.

Another monopoly in the making?

[krazyninja]

From a technology perspective, it is better to have a standardised platform. That increases the rate of introduction of new products, and builds critical mass.
But Symbian itself is coming from a consortium formed by the major cellphone makers. It suits them that they have all the phones running with their OSs. If this becomes a standard, then what do we have? Another microsoft, though this time it owns everything from infrastructure to your little phone. Doesnt look too good to me in the long term.
Is there a Linux powered cellphone anywhere in use? Apart from PDA/cellphone combos, that is...

Re:Another monopoly in the making?

[ketamine-bp]

til' now, i see several things against your point:

- the symbian company is doing a great job around, and its OS is efficient even with a relatively slow CPU.
- the symbian company do not give you any of the FUD apart from your MSFT stock may go down.
- Being a monopoly by itself is not wrong (mentioned in previous post), this is because monopoly is naturally an aftermath for good business (i.e. offering good products, etc.).

Finally, for your linux need:

- Anything that can run EPOC32 on it can run linux. the bootloader's there, it is a EPOC32 application that overwrites the entire RAM to do the thing. approximately 12MB of memory is needed. If a cut is required, 8MB is also possible, but with some application lost. (e.g. the GUI). last but not least, perl and vi's there.
- i have seen from mailing lists that Nokia's high-tier 9 series is getting its functionality rev' eng'ed to get linux running on it as principle OS, but don't expect too much from it in a short time.

Re:The battle is only beginning...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has had little impact so far. When the users gets their hands on the MS smartphone they will begin to get a true desktop integration for good or bad. So far I must say I like it and I have not been a great fan of MS in mobile phones. It is the small things that will do it. Cameras will be available for in practice all phones. On the smartphone you actually get MSN Messenger as the IM client.. this is what I think will make a big difference. It is not just an IM client, it is what a lot of users are actually used to have on their desktop.

Yea bloatware...

[panZ]

Am I the only one that thinks Symbian is a bloated, piss poor operating system? The idea that MS and Symbian are duking it out for embedded space scares the crap out of me. Symbian is doing well because it has great applications. The OS was designed by a bunch of Apps people who realized, "Hey, we need an OS to run our apps on instead of buying someone else's." They wrote this 16 meg (average complement of libraries) giant with C++ libs and very poor resource management. The reason it sells is they have the apps to back it up so an embedded deivce maker doesn't have to go out and buy them or develope their own.

I'm not poo pooing their success, hey, I've developed drivers for symbian devices, it pays the bills but for f-ks sake; if you are developing an embedded device and want efficient use of memory and battery, PLEASE consider small OSes like VxWorks or Nucleus.
This is what happens when you trust a bunch of English high level application developers write an OS... they drink beer and throw C++ bloat and undergraduate operating system classes at the problem. j/k /me ducks...
I kid because I love you guys...

Now what I'd like to see is ..

[Mr_Silver]

... a Symbian licencee or Apple walk into the PDA market and clean up. Literally.

For years, we've all been sitting around waiting for something that was powerful, flexible, stable, clean looking, customisation, upgradable and fast.

Palm have been lagging behind for so long it's untrue, OS 5 which was supposed to be the next greatest thing is starting to look a bit of a flop. It's faster, but thats about it. Oh yes and all the apps run on a compatibility layer.

Microsofts effort is packed with features, but confusing UI, unstable platform, a blatent memory hog and doesn't support the XScale speeeds.

So there is a prime chance here for a Symbian licencee (and even Apple) to walk in, produce a desirable PDA with all the features above and literally clean up.

Mind you, Jobs has stated that he thinks PDA's are "junk" and the Symbian licencees seem to be going down the Phone/PDA combo so I'll just have to live in hope really.

Re:Now what I'd like to see is ..

[DuncMan]

Mr_Silver wrote:
So there is a prime chance here for a Symbian licencee (and even Apple) to walk in, produce a desirable PDA with all the features above and literally clean up.

Symbian's progenitor was Epoc, originally from Psion. Psion's range of PDAs were the most elegant and powerful PDAs I'd seen, years ahead of what else was on the market. This was probably their fatal mistake- excellent PDAs before the PDA market was ready, big enough, knew what it wanted.

If you can find one, grab an end-of-stock Psion Revo or Psion 5mx and you'll be surprised. Carefully designed, smoothly integrated hardware and software. For example, I love how I can tweak the contacts database on my Revo to suit me, but it'll still synchronise smoothly with my Nokia mobile phone via IR. And there's a spreadsheet, database, word processor, e-mail client, et al, all packed into a compact 8MB device.

Given that Psion were squeezed out of the PDA market they created by Palm (with cheap, simplistic electronic diaries/ contacts managers) and Microsoft (with flashy, expensive, aggressively marketed uber-devices), I can't see a Symbian licensee (effectively) re-entering and dominating the PDA market.

I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think the area where Psion played is big enough to be financially viable.