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

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...

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.