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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?"
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....
...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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"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.
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.
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.