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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?"
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 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.
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...
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.
In a follow-up story Nokia detailed that in case their Psion acquisition plans failed, they would try to acquire Ericsson next. This would give them a 49.7% share of Symbian, which would prompt them to take over either of: Sony, Siemens, or Samsung. Nokia representative concluded that they would do whatever it takes to acquire control of Symbian.
Seriously, I hope they have considered purchasing the Symbian shares from few of those investors.
Well I hope they don't buy out Opera and take over their Opera web browser for Symbian. One of the reasons Opera is so great is because it is independent.
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
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.
Not to mention that Nokia would certainly alienate the other owners of Psion if it were to take a controlling share, and drive them to reconsider installing a Microsoft OS instead. The sole reason Symbian was given its current position as the primary cell phone OS was to fend off Microsoft, without giving any single handset vendor undue control over the software. To suggest that the other handset vendors would idly sit by while Nokia takes control of their common software is ridiculous. In conclusion, the article is just about an "industry analyst" playing mind games with investors who don't know any better.
This will be a good time to test that hypothesis out.
More than mere navel gazing.
I'd say Symbian is more "open" in some areas, while it is as open as MS in other areas.
On one hand everybody is allowed to look at the source of Eikon, the GUI layer of the operating system of Psion, without paying anything. Also you can see the entire sourcecode of their built-in word processor application. OK it's not opensource, but I appreciate their generous offer.
On the other hand, as far as any kernel-side things are concerned, Psion always behave like control freak. You cannot write ANY driver without paying amrs and legs. I'm not talking about the reasonable fee like several hundred dollars or 1000. As a result, there's not a single third-party driver for PCMCIA devices for Psion range of palmtops. None.
Also, as someone else already wrote, they've been quite insistent on NOT supplying any information about the serialization of the built-in applications, making it extremely hard for anybody to write file converter for any other platform than Windows.
And in terms of "growing" competition, umm yes really big competition. About the most sold Microsoft OS phone was the SPV at 50,000 units. The SonyEricsson P800 (Symbian) sold over 1,000,000 and the companies in control of Symbian are ALL out to keep microsoft away from this market. So in many ways Nokia NOT having overall control will be better for Nokia as it will help keep everyone together.
Microsoft are currently as much of a threat to Nokia's phone market as Nokia are to Microsoft's PDA market.... and right now I think Microsoft have potentially the most reason to worry.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Symbian is not independent - it's just "supported" by a range of mobile companies. This would be good, except that Nokia and SonyEricsson are the only ones in this alliance who openly oppose M$'s plans to take over the phone OS market.
A takeover of Symbian wouldn't really help Nokia in this regard. Since they know that, the only good reason would be to grab the shares from uninterested Psion, and then open it up for all to use.
The sooner the phone OS market goes to open source, the safer for the anti-M$ forces in the industry - be that an opened-up Symbian or embedded linux... if there was a stable linux based phone OS there would be no stopping it.
As it is, the industry is held back - and might eventually just give up all control to M$ - by infighting, jealousy, and distrust.