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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....
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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