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?"

Comments

Open System?

[barnaclebarnes]

What does this mean for the Symbian OS, which is currently an open OS?

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.

Re:Open System?

[seebs]

I'd call it fairly solidly non-open. When I had a Psion, Psion refused to document their file formats; they insisted that the only way to examine their data was to run code *on EPOC* which used the class interfaces to serialize and deserialize.

As a result, programs to convert data to and from Psion PDAs were difficult to write third-party stuff.

I liked the formfactor, I liked the idea of a real multitasking OS, but the fact is, Palm was a hell of a lot more open than Psion was, back in the day, and I don't think all that much has changed.

To add insult to injury, the only way to develop for Psion was to use Visual C++ with a special downloaded version of gcc, for which source was unavailable for a long time. I got this, to look at it, and it took me a year to get off their spam list.

Ugh.

Re:Open System?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is actually due to the fact that Symbian does not use normal linear file streams. While the file structure is well-defined, even the people who wrote the application could not easily tell you what the order of the bits is the file is.

On the other hand, most of symbian's applications do export stuff into standard formats (vcard, etc), or provide APIs to access PIM data, making it easier for 3rd parties to use.

Re:Open System?

[Troed]

Note: I'm an ex-Symbian employee.

The library you use to read/write the fileformats is called WINC, and is the same code that runs on Epoc but compiled for Windows. Excellent compatibility.

From what I can remember (I started programming Epoc on the summer of -98) the source to GCC was available the whole time - even externally.

Your mileage may vary.

Ownership breakdown

[TornSheetMetal]

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

Re:No more Symbian/Palm/Linux/Windows, PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're with ATT Wireless, Cingular, or T-Mobile (and possibly other smaller carriers), then use a Ericsson R-520. It does what you want, its fairly long, has great battery life, its cheap - and when you find a newer phone you like (perhaps a UMTS enabled clamshell...) all you have to do is move your SIM, since its GSM. There are plenty of cheap 1900MHz and even Tri-Band (1900/1800/900) MHz gsm phones that will do what you want.

More importantly, if you buy one of these cheaper phones (like an unlocked/sim-free R520 or 3390) the carrier has no justification for locking you into a contract (since they aren't subsidizing your phone), so if you get poor service, you can simply put a new sim in your old phone that has your old contacts already in it.

They better act fast

[rkaa]

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.

Re:Nokia in problems

[gl4ss]

well.. their market penetration has only increased(worldwide) from few years back(being at somewhere around ~40% of total market), when se only strugled for positive outcome for the first time in years(thanks to it's new phones selling ok).

the smaller/cheaper phones between nokia and se have pretty much the same featureset anyways, but se lacks totally what nokias series60 offers(their p800 is too expensive still, while superior to series60 phones technically).

phones are not about being smallest and lightest, otherwise we would all be using some matchbox sized phones, and would have been using for years.

Symbian

[Anonymous Coward]

I've programmed on Symbian and it's just a
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 .inf files, .mmp files, .rsc files, .app files, .pkg files, .sis files, and many many others.

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.