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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.
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?
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
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).
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.
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 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
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.
This will be a good time to test that hypothesis out.
More than mere navel gazing.
...the headline, which sounds like it's from an "Ultraman" episode. Sorry.
calamari
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! :)
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.