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?

Oops...

[ryanvm]

Am I the only one that thought that said Sybian?

Re:Oops...

[cqnn]

It was the next logical step after all...

To have the phone set on 'vibrate' by default.

Re:Oops...

[siliconwafer]

Sorry man, Sybian's do a lot more than just vibrate. :) Someone doesn't know their sex toys.... time to get some better pr0n obviously!

Hmm

[ShooterNeo]

A Sybian in a cell phone? Now that just might be a good idea. Of course, if you thought women talking on cellphones driving their 2 ton SUVs were bad enough, imagine that chaos if they were being pleasured by the sybian AND talking on the phone AND driving...

Re:"smarterphone"?

[Maniakes]

So MS's smartphone can play chess... does this me Symbian's can play Go? :)

I'm waiting for a cellphone that can play Global Thermonuclear War.

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.

I disagree

[El Pollo Loco]

I had a samsung phone. Never again will I buy samsung. The SCH-850 was a piece of crap. After a few weeks of using it, it would die. Not the battery, or screen. That would all work fine. It would show full signal strength, but would never connect to the network. I could not call, nor be called. I exchanged 3 times, all 4 phones did the same thing. I bought an LD-150, and the UI sux, but I can still call.

Re:I disagree

[Anthony Boyd]

The SCH-850 was a piece of crap. After a few weeks of using it, it would die. Not the battery, or screen. That would all work fine. It would show full signal strength, but would never connect to the network.

Yeah. See, the service requires you to pay a monthly bill.

Symbian EPOC

[vlad_petric]

... is by far the best OS for mobile devices, in terms of stability (I've had a Psion device for more than 2 years now; the OS *never* crashed and trust me, I've tried many things on it), functionality, and even memory consumption (the filesystem/application memory automatic balance is great).

I wish I could say that Sharp Zaurus running embedix Linux is a good match, but in fact it isn't. Not only it crashed on me once, and required cold reboot, but the boundaries of the filesystem and memory are also fixed; this means that if you want more application memory (to play Freeciv for instance) you have to create a swap file (!?!).

The Raven

Bluetooth -- Software development

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of cool stuff coming out for Symbian these day(I know, it's all in theory and testing). Symbian makes things jive just a little bit better. People are now using symbian in respect to bluetooth (switchme). Its something that definitely makes sense and will hopefully get bluetooth off the ground. Hopfully more developers will work to make the killer app.

Re:Good Lord....Symbian? Whats Next? Dildophone?

[Myco]

Have you priced a decent vibrator lately?

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?

[vlad_petric]

C'mon, you can't put an equal sign between Microsoft and Symbian, for two main reasons:

EPOC is a great, stable OS. No Microsoft OS has ever come close to the quality/stability of EPOC

bussiness ethics

Please understand, dear marxist slashdotters, that it is not illegal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is to abuse your monopoly, like Microsoft did (e.g. through product bundling)

The Raven

Re:Another monopoly in the making?

[spakka]

Huh? The members of the consortium are direct competitors of each other in the handset market. In what way does this resemble a monopoly?

Also, exactly how do you imagine they will acquire the infrastructure?

Symbian is cool..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and they use Perforce. :-) And Perforce offers an Open Source license to any project that develops Open Source. They're also much more reasonable then a certain somebody.

The battle is only beginning...

[mcjulio]

In a space that Microsoft doesn't own, it's going to come down to 3rd party apps and overall product value, combined with whoever's the best phone. Being a pda/phone combo is nice and all, but if your phone sucks, no one will use it long enough to get enjoyment out of the fact that it can do wireless http browsing and IMAP4.

Battery life will also be a big issue, I think, although I don't know how big. The HTC Canary does fairly well in standby mode, since it shuts off its power-sucking color screen. Not sure about the Symbian OEMs - I've only played with the Microsoft product.

Re:you're a retard

[Kenshin]

Imagine a Beowolf cluster of Sybians!!

Now THAT I'd pay to see!

Have you head about those new Sybian phones?

[Subcarrier]

Sybian Series 60, the ultimate sexperience, complete with Multimedia Massaging (MMS) capabilities. Now you can give your partner a buzz whenever you feel like it. An MMS just feels so much better than just a phone call! This is one phone you don't mind sticking under your belt.

Oh, and have you heard about those new Sybian phones for the male audience? They suck.

Re:Yea bloatware...

[Troed]

*cough*

Poor resource management?

Please tell me which other multimedia capable handheld/smartphone operating systems which even come close to the excellence of the CleanupStack::Push/Pop .. (as one example).

Yes, I've also developed on Symbian.

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:This artcile is utter fantasy!

[Corporate Troll]

I live in Europe, and you are not completely wrong, but a bit misinformed. Most PDA's here clearly are Palms, but Symbian devices(mostly Psion's) come in second. Pocket PC's (thus WinCE) are rarely seen here, actually, I've only seen them in the shops. I have seen exactly *one* MS based phone (on a Sony cellphone, I think)
Yes, I know, just anecdotial evidence.

About the merits of the system itself: the Symbian OS really *is* good, much more flexible than the Palm versions (and the multitasking is real, unlike the Palm which only does task-switching). Want a nice extra application like a PDF viewer? Most likely it exists, and it is probably even OpenSource.
The only reason that Palm's are so popular is because it fits "the needs of most people". Not mine, I want more sophistication and hence I got myself a Psion Revo+. WinCE devices? Have yet to seen one in use by someone.

A bit misleading..

[jyristys]

Samsung is NOT just licensing the raw Symbian OS, they are actually getting Nokia's Series60 platform (the same one Siemens licensed a while ago) which is based on Symbian OS but includes many improvements and fixes, not to mention a far superior Java/MIDP implementation. Series60 includes also the whole UI, SOS just comes with a very crude reference implementation.
Samsung just has to license the SOS separately because of complicated contracts between Nokia and Symbian.

Re:"smarterphone"?

[Ch_Omega]

"As it supports both J2ME and it's own C++ based API's it can support anything you write for it, I'd be very supprised if both Go and Chess don't exisit for J2ME, and I know EPOC has Chess, which would not be hard to port over to Symbian 7."

Actually, Series 60 is Symbian 6.1, not Symbian 7.

...And yes, there are lots of both Symbian software, and j2me aplications out there. :)

Re:This artcile is utter fantasy!

[10Ghz]

"Now *I* had a Symbian phone, but that statement is utter garbage! Quite simply they are lying to deceive the public.

Palm OS is the market leader in Europe by a long long way. Pocket PC also has a *much* larger takeup than Symbian devices"

Really?

http://www.canalys.com/pr/r2002102.htm

In short: Shipments Q3 2002.

Nokia (Symbian): 55%
Palm: 15%
HP: 9%
Sony: 3%
Casio: 3%
Others: 13%

In Q3 2001, Nokia was also the leader with 27% share (compared to Palms 22%). So Symbian-devices are selling better than Palms or PocketPC's!