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Nokia Taking Over Psion to Control Symbian?

Posted by Cliff on from the operating-system-power-plays dept.

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?"

12 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Please no. by Zebbers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....

  2. Nokia would not dare to hurt Symbian... by ezh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  3. Is this a sign? by dolo666 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Is this a sign? by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      you know that your 'nokia is in trouble' link goes to a story from December 10 of 2002, a story that was speculation already then? i'm sure with little googling you could have found a newer article with essentially the same innards(of course the color phones would have to be replaced with something else since they have taken off bigtime). though your another link has "Seen as the star performer of the telecom sector, Nokia registered only a 1 per cent rise in second-quarter sales, to 7.01 billion euros."

      anyways.. only thing surprising is that they(or the other companies in it) haven't bought psion out of symbian earlier. when you take a look on http://www.psion.com/ what's the phone you see? a nokia 7650. and quite frankly psion itself doesn't seem to have that much intrest in symbian(as something to be actively part of anymore), though i'm just a little out of loop what the f is psions product nowadays? poppers? one lousy email reader for symbian?

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  4. I wonder if Nokia will employ... by SharpFang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

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    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
    1. Re:I wonder if Nokia will employ... by MosesJones · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...some intelligent geeks for design.

      Sorry to pick on you, but it is this sort of comment that pisses me off about techies trying to do design. There are basically two competing schools of design

      KISS and WILI.

      KISS is Keep it Simple Stupid and works well, this gets you elements that actually work and are clean to their purpose

      WILI is Well I Like It and is typified by the "wouldn't it be great if" and "I'd like to see" arguments that come so often from the technical, and graphic design, communities.

      Nokia is the worlds number one in designing PHONES, to say these people are clueless is to stand on the mountain of arrogance and start building upwards. So there are a few things that aren't integrated well into the phone, and sure that will improve the point is...

      I have Nokia 5510

      What ever they did made you buy it. So what if it isn't 100% perfect, if it was would you upgrade in 12 months time ?

      What are obvious Good Things in your WILI world wouldn't actually make the product great.

      Geeks are rubbish at design, Graphic Designers are normally worse at designing Websites and products. Please lets leave it to the professionals.

      --
      An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  5. Article statement has no basis by rzbx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.
  6. Probably not a good idea... by PierceLabs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:No more Symbian/Palm/Linux/Windows, PLEASE! by defjesta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I dont believe you are giving credit were it is due, and I also dont know what phones / deals you have been looking at, but I think you need have a good look at whats going on before opening your mouth. I've heard mobile carrier support is useless at best in the US, and globaly they are a very small player in the cellular world. This would probably explain why your paying so much for so little. And the games! maybe a couple years ago your comment on "lamest Arkanoid" could be justified, but certainly not these days. The nokia 60 series has a 100mhz ARM core, coding in c++ and optimising with ASM can get some impressive results. What did Quake run on when it first came out? (yes i know the differences in chip architechture, but clock for clock 100 mhz is still damn fast for a phone). Your points are laughable and can only be explained if you are using a 1st generation phone. Wake up and stop trying to slow the march of progress.

  8. What it means is by TerryAtWork · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.
  9. Here, here! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

  10. Re:Open System? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    But then, isn't Windows an open system? I mean, Win32 API is published by MS itself...

    Don't be fooled into thinking that Microsoft documents their *entire* API. There's a lot of stuff nobody really knows about. Some of it is in the "undocumented secrets" genre of books, and others have yet to be discovered (because we don't have the source code).