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Nokia Takes Control of Symbian
jpatokal writes "CNN reports: Nokia has bought out Psion's share of Symbian, pushing its stake in the mobile phone OS to a dominant 63%. This means rivals like Siemens and Samsung may now pretty much be forced to choose between proprietary Nokia or Microsoft technology. Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?" We reported on a rumor to this effect late last year.
Well, they do still make "industrial" portables, like the Netbook. Shame of that is, the Netbook now runs Windows Mobile (Windows CE, PocketPC, whatever it is now).
It really is a loss, as my Psion (Revo+) is still the best organiser I have ever used. I bought a Sharp Zaurus because I was suckered in by the Linux angle, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Revo. And nobody seems to be releasing any Symbian based organisers anymore, which makes Palm the default next best choice.
Free vibrator advertised with every mobile phone. also MIT accidentally invents cellular sex toy, and there's a vibrator slip cover which I could not find because google has been poisoned badly which I believe it meant for those ubiquitous nokia phones (the basic nokia phone is the honda civic of the cellular world.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Linux competing with Microsoft on the desktop is a whole different thing from Linux competing on devices. Microsoft has already won the desktop war so its a matter of defeating an entrenched monopoly which is really hard to do. They most definitely have not won anything in consumer electronics yet and Linux is still very much in the running so DON'T GIVE UP before the fights really even started.
Linux, especially running Qt.Embedded and Qtopia, is a great platform and gaining an OK application base thanks to Zaurus. Its most definitely a serious competitor in this arena though its probably a year or two out from becoming something that starts taking serious market share on phones. One down side is its a little heavy so it needs a little higher end hardware.
Asia already loves Linux. They are smart enough to realize that Microsoft is not someone you really want to partner with. If cell phones go the same route as PC's they realize Microsoft will be the only one that really wins, not the hardware manufacturers.
Nokia is a direct competitor to Siemens, Samsung and LG so its just a matter of time before Nokia uses their new absolute control of Symbian to give themselves an inside track technically or financially. Having now been burned by a competitor seizing a controlling stake in their software platform I imagine the true openness of Linux is looking real attrractive to them right now.
Linux is also a logical successor to TRON which is the OS Asian companies use overwhelmingly in consumer electronics now.
@de_machina
Nokia is a Finnish company.
For the foreseeable future, you will no trouble getting a 'phone only' phone.. There are still a lot of pieces to the wireless market (infrastructure, carriers, cell phone manufacturers at the highest levels)..
Within a company like Nokia they have many phones in development at all times. Their strategy has always been to target individual phones and very precise markets. If you just want basic phone service, Nokia has a phone for you (not a Symbian phone). If you want more they can do that to.
This works out well for Nokia (they move HUGE volumes in those lower end phones) and the carriers who are interested in getting both the high end (data plans, unlimited minutes, etc..) and the low end (emergency calls only) using their networks. Having worked with many different cell phone manufacturers (we develop for various Symbian flavors) and carriers I'm pretty confident that this is not going to be changing any time soon. They are always VERY concerned about pricing themselves out of the lower end consumer, while wanting to maximize they're return from the higher end. It's a really amazing balancing act, but the end result is that there are (and likely will be) phones for almost every taste.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Symbian: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by competitor.
PalmOS: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
PocketPC: Mature, Heavyweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
Linux: Immature, Heavyweight, entirely open
Ecos: Mature, lightweight, entirely open
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not a bitter pill? Well, there are not manyWindows Mobile Phone Edition licencees, but one of them got royally screwed.
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I code for WinCE and Symbian. I have a Nokia 3650 (Symbian OS 6) and 6600 (Symbian OS 7). The Symbian OS is FAR from bulletproof and has reproducible OS crashes. I have never had WinCE (PocketPC 2002, 2003, or Smartphone 2002) crash on me.
Plus the Symbian SDK and APIs use a peculiar dialect of C++ (with strange non-standard exception handling) that is incompatible with standard C++, making cross-platform code sharing difficult.
cpeterso
The fact that this post got +5 Informative goes to show that the moderators really are on crack, and that many /.ers really don't know much about PalmOS development, but like to spout off their incorrect ideas anyway.
GCC, GDB, and Pilrc (resource compiler) have been availible for a long time. POSE (Palm OS Emulator) is also completely open source and maintained by PalmSource. Right there is a complete open source dev environment.
OS documentation is pretty complete, up to and including info on many of the internal data structures. There's also several easy to access newsgroups, faqs, books, etc, with tons of info for doing practically anything you could imagine.
Really, after doing some side programming on the Palm for 3+ years, I've never seen anyone who's had as much trouble as this guy's said he had. Heck, I've got a better dev enviroment, docs, etc, for Palm, than the solaris & linux systems that I use at my full time job.
PS, PalmSource is now working on a fully integrated & free Eclipse dev environment...