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Nokia Taking Over Psion to Control Symbian?
securitas writes: "Reuters reports that Nokia is considering a takeover of Psion (mirror at Forbes), to gain control of the Symbian operating system. Psion is the second largest shareholder in Symbian with a 31.1 percent stake. Nokia holds 32.2 percent. The move is seen as a tactic to fight off Microsoft and dominate the lucrative and growing mobile phone software market. Symbian is currently owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Panasonic, Psion, Samsung Electronics, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. The report originates in the London newspaper, Business. What does this mean for the Symbian OS, which is currently an open OS?"
Thought that said Sybian. That would be an interesting integration...
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
Psion envy.
I own a Nokia Symbian phone and would really hate to see this happen. Symbian is so good because it IS independent from one single phone company.
Oh well....
First I thought it said 'Nokia to take over Prison control System' Which freaked me out. Then I thought it said 'Nokia to take Psionic Control of System' which freaked me out some more... phew
or close the source since other mobile device developers would just switch to Windows CE/Embedded Linux instead.
In a long run all proprietory systems die out, open ones survive.
Certainly, IMHO
If Nokia can stay on top of mobile phones, then they can stay on top of wireless technology as a whole (handheld=>phone integration), and compete heavy with the top dogs, then they have a shot at making it past the tech bottleneck coming in 2009. While I'm at it, I should say that this is a suspicious move from Nokia.
"The move is seen as a tactic to fight off Microsoft and dominate the lucrative and growing mobile phone software market."
I see it as a parallel to the problems Palm was having when they tried to get control of Symbian in 2001. This could be a sign Nokia is in trouble.
This is also good news for shareholders in Psion, as a similar event caused a jump in share price back in 2001 when Palm tried to get control of Symbian.
Symbian is NOT an open system by most free/open source followers standards. It is an OS which can be licensed just like most others. Sure you get more access to the source code and internals but you cannot redistribute with no royalties and other advantages which traditional free/open software has.
That being said it is still a great OS for phones.
[Please type your sig here.]
...some intelligent geeks for design.
I have Nokia 5510. I can say the person who gave the ideas for the phone must have been very enthusiastic but quite clueless. Person who created the actual design and had clue about stuff definitely lacked that enthusiasm... and built a phone that mostly sucks.
1) Qwerty keyboard. Great for SMS, but there's no "notepad", phonebook entries are really short, in most cases the great keyboard is wasted.
2) Voice dialing, MP3 player, radio, analog audio input But no voice notes/recording. Was it so hard to hook up the microphone to the audio input?
3) Standard dialtones despite MP3 player. You can listen to MP3/radio only through earphones.
4) USB link to upload MP3. Works as "USB harddrive" and you can use it to transfer arbitrary data, but the phone can make use only of specially modified MP3s. To upload logos, ringtones, gfx SMS, "blankers" and all that stuff you need a special cable that goes into some strange slot under the battery. Same with using it as modem. USB for music only.
In short, this is a box with several devices that are simply not interconnected or very loosely connected. Things that would be trivial weren't done. (took me 5 mins to build a "powered microphone" to record voice over analog input) The idea was great, the final product sucks. Even greatest OS won't do any good if people won't use their imagination and do some obvious Good Things.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"A takeover of Psion would give Nokia control over Symbian and help it head off growing competition in cellphone software from Microsoft, the world's largest software company."
How exactly will this "...help it head off growing competition..."?
I dislike these articles that come to some sort of conclusion or make statements and provide no insight as to how they themselves came to that conclusion.
Am I missing something here?
Question everything.
The current ownership of Symbian breaks down as follows: Nokia 32.2, Psion 31.1, Ericsson 17.5, Samsung 5.0, Siemens 4.8, and Sony Ericsson 1.5
For some reason I don't think that it would be a good idea to have Symbian controlled by an Nokia. One of the good things about Symbian is that it is beign advanced to cover the needs of general mobile applications, and should this become co'opted by a single party like Nokia it is likely that such a vendor focus could stunt the growth of the Symbian platform overall.
Anyone else read the title, "Nokia Taking Over Psion to Control Symbian?", and wonder what science ficiton novel we were talking about?
I assume Nokia is the bad governement, Psion is a planet (or some such), and Symbian is some resource/person/super_robot?
Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes, the bar, well, he eats you.
Given their recent N-Gage disaster, I'd think twice before betting that they're going to easily grow their position in the phone market. If Nokia take control of Symbian, it might be a small-term win for Nokia, but I think that it will be a long-term win for Microsoft.
:( How hard would it be to make a Linux distro for Phones?
Think about it - with Nokia in control of Symbian, other phone manufacturers would actually be better off going with Microsoft Windows for Phones. Nokia would be a competitor and not have any incentive to help the other companies that use Symbian. Because Microsoft isn't a hardware manufacturer - in theory a hardware maker would have a little more clout in the direction that OS went in the future.
Although it's really the lesser of two evils at that point.
After their wild success with the greatest hand-held game platform (I speak, of course, of the N-Gage) there's NOTHING that Nokia can't do!
oops, forgot the sarcasm tags
Symbian was designed for devices with small memory. This, unfortunately, comes at a price - even doing simple string operations can be quite a chore. Memory is really cheap these days, so its advantage is diminishing
I do own a Psion Revo, and its doing its job excellently. It never required a reboot, unlike my Zaurus PDA which did (although the current ROMs are quite stable). But ...
With a linux programming background, developing for the Zaurus simply means that you have to get used to its resolution & a few other minor quirks (I never developed for WinCE, but I'm pretty sure a Windoze developer would say that it's pretty much the same thing). Developing for Symbian means learning a new philosophy. Learning a new programming philosophy is worth it when the number of devices sold for that OS is high (e.g. Palm). But Symbian devices never sold that well (at least in the US).
This is probably one of the reasons Psion uses WinCE for its newest Netbook.
The Raven
I played with 7650 which is real Symbian model and it's much better than 5510. Probably you will like also 6800 or 6810 ("coming soon") which feature full qwerty keyboard, and are much better programmed. Of course you are right pointing all the weak points of 5510, but keep in mind, that it's a low-end model (if hardware is not a problem anymore, it's software what makes a difference). Also it was released some time ago, and will not give you all the features you may expect today.
This Is Not a Sig
Is this the same Psion as in Psion Flight Simulator, Psion Chequered Flag, etc. ?
If so, then maybe Nokia is onto something for its builtin games. I think I have my original cassettes somewhere..
I am about to go nuts here because of these rediculous new phones. I went to buy a new cellular phone the other day and they were all clunky, beastly, color-screened, battery hogs that could barely make a phone call. But! They could play a game of the lamest Arkanoid you've ever seen. ONLY for $300, whee!
These cell phones can't keep a reception, drop calls like hot potatoes, and otherwise sound like shit. To add insult to injury they overheat, lock-up and need to be "rebooted", and damnit their batteries are more powerful and yet fail to last.
There's a few things I want my cell phone to do if I'm going to pay $300 for the device and $40+ a month for service:
1) Have a battery life comparable to a landline 900mhz wireless phone. That's hours upon hours of talk time or days upon weeks of standby.
2) Have audio quality and reliability equal to that of a land phone even when moving although in a reasonable location (not underground).
3) Be thinner, not smaller. I've got big hands so I can't be holding something 0.7" across. But that doesn't mean I need a phone that needs a man-bag, my pockets should suffice. Half an inch or less is something to shoot for on thickness. Height and width should be like a normal phone: It's got to reach from my ear to my mouth, right?
4) Not to heat up like a red-hot poker after 20 minutes of talking. Maybe that's a tactic in combination with the atrocious battery life to keep us from taking advantage of free nights and weekends.
As far as I'm concerned all that other internet, symphonic ring tone, downloadable wallpaper, customizable faceplate crap can be sacrificed until they get it right. I want a goddamn phone. Stop giving me overpriced toys for overgrown 12-year-olds.
I have to admit, I never really pictured Nokia to be the lonely, under-stimulated type. So far as controlling Sybian, I've never seen one personally, but from what I've read Sybians have fairly simple, yet robust controls, I don't really think it would be neccessary to purchase Psion to get the desired results.
Oh, and so far as 'remaining open', I think it would go completely against the design of Sybian to go closed. I mean you would lose most available functionality by closing up all of a sudden.
</deadpan<
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Nokia's stock(NYSE: NOK) would surge from its current stable of around 17 bucks a share to something in the 20s range if this actually happened. And possibly along with it would surge all of the telecommunications companies with stakes in the Symbian OS for their mobile phones, like Sony-Ericsson and the others.
This is an exciting development to keep an eye on...
The Priory of Psion has been infiltrated! They will know the secrets of Symbian! We must act at once. Long, long ago the wheels for this event were set in motion. We must play our roles, we all know what to do! The rose must be kept secret.
People always ask why their WinCE devices don't have decent audio integration with the phone. It's because WinCE audio drivers universally stink.
Symbian, on the other hand, lets you prove your audio channels correct and step through the whole stack with your favorite debugger. I would give up stoopid Wind32 HWND semantics for that ability any day of the week. It's not "learning a new philosophy," it's, "getting rid of Microsoft's x86-based Win32 encumbarances and closed source." I am sure others who speak from experience agree.
...Not that there's anything wrong with it...
(oh no, of course not!)
This isn't redundant, its new information.
If you can point me out to where in this article that it was already posted, I'll rim CowboyNeal and french Kathleen Fent's anus
This is a nerd site after all.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
people had better hang on to their copies of the source code for this OS because it's going to disappear into a corporation's vaults.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
There are more potential renegades than Motorola in their the Sybian ranks.
Samsung are about to announce their first Mobile Windows device.
A week ago, InfoSync ran a piece on the upcoming Microsofts Mobile Windows features.
Interesting reading.
" Not to heat up like a red-hot poker after 20 minutes of talking."
.....
Dude,
guys don't talk on the phone that long.
That's a girl thing. Here's a guy's conversation.
First: Man to Man:
Man 1: Hey what's up
Man 2: Let go to a strip club
Man 1: Fuckin' a. I'll be over in 1/2 an hour.
BOOM. Phone hangs up. Conversation is less than a minute.
Second: Man to Woman
This doesn't happen
Third: Woman to Man
Woman: Hey, what's up
Man: I'm kinda busy right now.
Woman: Can you come over? I'll make you dinner, you can fuck me, and then watch the football game
Man: Okay, but no talking
BOOM: conversation over. Total time.... 1 minute
If you're on longer than that, I'll bet you have no dick. Just a pair of tits and a hairy hole.
...I want my phone to make calls, and thats it...period. I've had so much trouble with newer phones...9 Nokia 8210's in one year (they got replaced free of charge whenever they got borked...which as you can see was often). Now, the 8210 is not a new phone, it's not even particularly advanced, but it's got more in there than I need and thus more to go wrong.
;o) can make and receive calls and has a phone book function, thats it. Maybe a simple calculator, but I can do most thinks in my head anyway so that isn't even needed.
I want a phone that looks nice, is fairly small, has a vibrate function (so I can put it on silent but still know theres a call coming in, so don't even think what you were about to!
I remember old phones, they were great, I've still got a particularly unfeatured (calls,phonebook, sms and, well, thats it actually) 5 year old phone that works perfectly - well, it would if it werent tied to a crap pre-paid sim card, but I digress.
Also, when (not if) you drop a modern phone they always tend to split apart spewing your battery, sim card and case in 3 different directions. Old phones from way back when? You dropped them and they left a dent in the floor (or your foot, whichever was in the way), none of this breaking crap.
Basically, each to their own, you may want to play sonic on your NGage or whatnot, I'd rather just make a call, and get out a Gameboy Advance when I want some gaming action to keep me occupied on the move. Yes its cool and all that you can code for it in c++ and its 100's of times faster than my first computer from a purely geeky point of view, but I don't need that in a phone, not having it will not impact your ability to use the phone for what it is designed for, making and receiving calls.
I am NaN
I agree! I work with Symbian OS....not only is it a pain in the ass, but they (Nokia/Symbian) work to obscure the internals. For example, you can download an SDK with public API's, but you have to pay big $$$ to get at the unpublished API or the sources. Also, they have purposely tried to hide functionality from the user in the name of protecting the user from themself (don't belive me, try browsing the filesystem with a 3650 or try to manually configure the modems).
IMHO, the problem is that the mobile market is the next big cash cow (accourding to some) and an open system creates too much competition...wouldn't it be a shame if someone beat Nokia or Symbian to the Killer App or feature that makes the big bucks. In fact, I've actually heard of in-fighting between Symbian/Nokia/etc where each vendor is carefully guarding their own piece in anticipation of when the market finally explodes. The flaw in all of this, however, is that developers resist moving to Symbian OS for these very reasons (who wants to write a pain-in-the-ass piece of non-portable code that is expensive to maintain and potentially get between 800 lb gorillias fighting over teritory), with the end result being a lack of quality applications for Symbian OS, which in the end will cause the market explosion to happen elsewhere (if at all).
Anyway, long story short, this Nokia move doesn't surprise me a bit...actually, it makes sense if Nokia and Symbian are indeed butting heads...
If Nokia can make all their medium and high end phones Series 60 (symbian based), that'll be good. Series 40 is nice but way too slow (comparable to T68i speed...imagine...) And I think Samsung
This is not an insane asylum after all.
By the way, which one did you escape from? Or do they let you on the internet where you are commited?
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I wouldn't mind seeing this happen. Then Sony Ericsson might think about moving from Symbian to Linux with Qt/Embedded. I don't really like the way Nokia seems to be going with their new form factors. I prefere phones like Ericsson's P800 and P900. The only problem with them in my opinion (asside from price) is the OS. If the P900 ran Linux and Qt/Embedded you would basicly have a Zaurus with GSM. This works great for me as I tend to use my headset for nearly all my calls.
If you don't get why, go to The Sybian website to get in on the joke.
This will be a good time to test that hypothesis out.
More than mere navel gazing.
link[07-11-2003]
...the headline, which sounds like it's from an "Ultraman" episode. Sorry.
I still believe J2ME is a better mobile platform than Symbian...
I think nokia might really be in problems. I'm not using observations from "above", but more from the "ordinary customers" in the street.
A few years ago (holland and switzerland) almost everyone I know bought a nokia phone. They were the only sensible choice for critical and demanding consumers. Nowadays they have been completely replaced in this segment by Sony ericsson. Nokia has lost their technology and marketing advantage. SE has the lightest and smallest phones and/or with most features nowadays.
Seems that every time Symbian is mentioned on Slashdot, someone has to come up with the same old Sybian jokes.. We're NERDS goddammit! We should be thinking about handheld devices when someone mention Sybian, not the other way around! :)
...thanks to guerilla actions by the Symbianese Liberation Army!
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
What does this mean for the Symbian OS, which is currently an open OS?"
In what sense is Symbian OS "open"? It looks to me like it's a proprietary set of APIs and a proprietary product that is controlled by a single company that just happens to have a lot of investors. That's better than Windows CE, but still not "open".
I think the best thing for the phone market would be if it switched aggressively to truly open systems. That means systems with open APIs (POSIX, X11, Gtk+) and preferably open source implementations (Linux, BSD). Then, nobody would have to worry about whether Nokia is the lesser evil than Microsoft.
Symbian is already under Nokia's control. It's an open OS in name only. Psion has already started to experiment with Windows CE: http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/4156.html
This would more be a move by Nokia to make sure that Psion (who's EPOCH OS was the basis for Symbian) doesn't jump ship. They've lost Motorola and others.
To be honest, Symiban would only benefit - the consortium has not been as effective as it could have been - it's only been Nokia's intervention that's helped them make any progress.
hey ! Didnt anyone tell you ? phone size is inversely proportional to cock size. You much have a really huge dong
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
If you can get hexadecimal floating point working, it should be just n/64h, then move the floating point two to the left. Since usually they're retarded and work with hex integers, you should be able to just add some zeros to n to make sure you get enough digits in your answer.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I've programmed on Symbian and it's just a
.inf files, .mmp files, .rsc files, .app files, .pkg files, .sis files, and many many others.
terrible development environment. Think C++
with lots of overloaded operators and wall-to-wall
typedefs and coding infrastructure rules.
Understanding one line of code can take hours.
The books are all written by Symbian apologists
and are very annoying to read. For example, at
one point one of the books presents as a virtue
the fact that Symbian makes 27 memory allocations
for each keyclick, saying in effect that "the system is doing a lot for the user".
Regular makefiles do not work. To build an application, one uses a cobbled-up combination of Microsoft Visual C, gnu C, Perl, Microsoft make, gnu make, perl, and about 10 closed-source things.
There are
Plus, the OS is not open-source, it's closed,
and even the development tools are not open.
It is just barely possible to develop for
Symbian on Linux, using Wine for the closed-source parts of the compilation/build chain.
There are no userid's or mmu protection, so in C++
the programmer can do anything.