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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?"

26 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, Symbian by Old+Uncle+Bill · · Score: 3, Funny

    Thought that said Sybian. That would be an interesting integration...

    --
    Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
  2. 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....

    1. Re:Please no. by nikster · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. Wow what a subject!! by Fyndlorn · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  4. 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

  5. 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.
  6. Open System? by barnaclebarnes · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    [Please type your sig here.]
    1. Re:Open System? by seebs · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
    2. Re:Open System? by Troed · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      it's in my head
  7. 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.

    --
    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  8. 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.
  9. Ownership breakdown by TornSheetMetal · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  10. 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.

  11. Is the title from a SciFi novel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

  12. Symbian OS by vlad_petric · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Most people who worked with it will tell you the same thing: as far as programability is concerned, Symbian OS just sucks ...

    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

  13. Psion by Old+Wolf · · Score: 4, Funny

    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..

  14. No more Symbian/Palm/Linux/Windows, PLEASE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. Re:No more Symbian/Palm/Linux/Windows, PLEASE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  15. Was Nokia that lonely? by numbski · · Score: 4, Funny

    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).

  16. WinCE (audio) sucks by js7a · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One of the huge advantages that Symbian has is that as a licensed developer, you can look at the source, unlike WinCE, which ends up with very buggy audio drivers on every single one of the five WinCE platforms I've developed on. Back in v2 days, WinCE was fairly lean and reasonably real-time, although it's always had a problem with unpredictable garbage collection every 100K new()s or so. But the Win32-spawned waveIn() routines are a disgusting nightmare for both the device driver author and the API user. They suck beyond any reasonable measure. This fact results in WinCE devices with intermittent audio bugs, intermittent distortion, intermittent crashes and panics, incorrect calling semantics, and behavior inconsistent with the same Win32 functions.

    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.

  17. They better act fast by rkaa · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  18. symbian on p900 is nearly perfect by PureCreditor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The customization of Symbian OS for P900 is nearly perfect by all accounts. It feels like a phone but with powerful PDA functionality. MP3, video, touch screen, J2ME...you name it. Althought I think the UI on it has a bit too many colors, making it a bit fancy for those who prefer the simplicity of Palm OS (okay, PalmOS default GUI is rather plain). One thing though - the camera should be megapixel with flash and digital zoom (or better, optical). Symbian did a great job on the P900 and the Nokia 6600 because it's so flexible to each manufacturer's specification. I'd hate to see the OS becoming Nokia centric (very stable, but on the lagging edge of new features). My last point can be shown by how long it took Nokia to release a phone with a 65K color screen, a resolution better than 128x128, and omni-Bluetooth-presence. Also, the 8910i being dual-band does nothing to help expand its market share to the high-end executives in USA and Canada who have to settle with lessor products by Motorola....

    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

  19. Re:Hexadecimal please? by killerkalamari · · Score: 3, Funny
    The current ownership of Symbian breaks down in hexadecimal as follows (using the definition of 1% equals one part in one hundred hex): Nokia 52.7%, Psion 4F.A%, Ericsson 2C.D%, Samsung C.D%, Siemens C.5%, and Sony Ericsson 3.D%

    calamari

  20. Sy(m)bian jokes. by Ch_Omega · · Score: 3, Funny

    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! :)