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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.
Their software is also generally superior to Microsoft's, and more mature. SymbianOS (and its predecessors) was engineered from Day One back in the late 80's to run without failure on highly constrained hardware. So if I were Samsung or Siemens, I'd still see little reason to switch to MS.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
like kyocera 6035/7135?
don't they count at all?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Seems to me that now they're out of Symbian, they are a company w/out a product, since IIRC they announced that they were stopping making organisers a while back.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Interesting. I have an n-gage, and don't think too highly of it. How long do you figure it'll be before you physically cannot buy a cell phone and service for calls only? No games, ringtones, just battery life and an address book? Too bad, I was liking this whole information revolution thing until I got lost in the middle of it.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Motorola has at least one phone (a 3G phone, the A920) based on Symbian. I like it so far, the interface is pretty well done. But does this mean Nokia will soon be pushing Motorola away from that as well? Motorola's has released phones with their own OS, Symbian, Linux, and one of microsoft's OS too, so I guess motorola has all sorts of alternatives.
Is Linux (running on a PDA meant to run Linux) more stable than one running PocketPC 2002? I have CONSTANT issues w/the device locking up hard and forcing a complete reset (losing everything that wasn't stored on the CF card -- many programs require at least pieces of themselves be installed on the main memory and not a storage card).
It's a big time hassle for me and I would love to switch if Linux had the stability on the PDAs that it does on the PC side.
An address book that can sync with my computer
A remote to change my TV/DVD/VCR
A remote to cut on my house lights
A calendar
A few games to keep me occupied while waiting for a dinner reservation/girlfriend in the bathroom
A presentation remote for my computer.
A camera - great for emergencies - you always have your phone with you - you rarely have your digicam with you.
A good MP3 player for trips
The cool thing is that all that pretty much exists in the phone I have a Sony P800.
I think the p800 and p900 will be the shift that Sony has already promised away from the Symbian OS and onto Palm (that is powerful enough to do all the above) BUT IT WILL TAKE A COLLABORATION WITH APPLE in my opinion to get the cell phone right. The only reason my phone is what it is now is because it synced to my Mac via Bluetooth.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
While Nokia does own the largest market share of mobile phones (around 50%, while the best next competitor has 15% or something), they have never so far engaged in anything similar to strong-arm, no-prisoners tactics of a Redmond corporation we all know and love. In fact, they have pushed for adoptions of open (as in "not Nokia's") standards; Java Mobile Edition being the latest example. With 50% of the market they could have pushed for some custom, lock-in solution but they didn't.
I think Nokia's track record has been OK so far. In my book it stands among the "likeable" corporations, like Toyota and Canon. It'll be interesting to see if they will be able to resist the temptation with Symbian though.
Why can't we just accept a better product when it is already out there instead of having to wait for Microsoft to develop a 'new software tedchnology' and wait still longer for hardware vendors to use it and still end up with an inferior product.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
In a sense. Nokia is moving to a situation where they have a monopoly on control of the Symbian OS. But in buying a controlling stake in Symbian, Nokia will potentially alienate their other cellphone partners, and introduce OS fragmentation on vendor lines in the mobile phone market.
Nokia, with by far the largest mobile market share, will obviously continue to put Symbian into its products. However, will others? Given Sony's heritage with the Clie it is very possible that Sony-Ericsson could move towards Palm-based phones, while Microsoft will push Windows Mobile as an "independent vendor" through playing on other manufacturers' distaste for funding their main competitor, Nokia, with licensing fees.
It seems to me it would be Good Thing to be able to choose your phone hardware vendor seperately from what OS your phone would run. It would therefore be helpful to have a port of Linux running on Nokia phones, Sony phones, etc, so that users can choose to install Linux if they wish. The Linux kernel and gcc have already been ported to arm, which most of these phones use, so running Linux would seem to mostly be a matter of supporting I/O devices (GSM, screen, keypad, bluetooth, MMC, speaker, microphone, camera, etc). Are there any efforts currently to get Linux running on mobile phones that ship with Symbian or Windows by default? How proprietary is the hardware? Are there other open-source systems better-suited to this task?
If a Linux for Phones distro was available I'd install it on my Nokia 6600 in a second. Symbian is just too limiting.
- GPRS which is a completely overengineered way of running data over GSM. Nokia's poor ideas implemented in GPRS have lead to its low throughput, excessive latancy and over complicated configuration.
- WAP which was mostly driven by Nokia has cut mobiles off from the real WWW and created an unnecessary and largely useless new markup language. The kind of simplified HTML used in I-Mode is a much better solution.
- A campaign to create a ".mobile" TLD which will mess-up the Internet address space by being completely redundant and badly overlapping with the existing domain usage. BTW they also propose that sites with a ".mobile" TLD MUST use the terrible mobile data protocols which they have been instrumental in defining.
I could go on, but I hope this has made the point!This has been coming for over 5 years. It is just the beginning.
That's really funny. You could say just about the same things when comparing American Democracy with COMMUNISM.
:) . It's sort of funny how we slashdot is defining proprietary these days. If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it? And plus, linux is quite proprietary in itself. Linux runs windows programs much better than windows runs linux apps using Qt, GTK, and the likes.
The fact is, openness in itself does not make something better. I could go on and make a long list of communist governments which failed, but I'm not going to.... as there have been no successes.
The orignal drivers of Communism:
----Everybody shares work. Every man does his equal part and gives back to the motherland.
----Freedom from oppressive governments. Let the people rule. (As you know, this has never been the case, and was probably the biggest point of failure of communism)
----Not being locked into a proprietary government
----"Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize." You have neatly summed communism up in a single sentence. I congratulate you.
-----It's not like we can forcibly remove RMS or Linus if we don't like them or they're doing a bad job, though, the theory behind their philosophy says we should be able to. *cough... Stalin... cough*
Am I saying that open-source is communist? No. I'm not going to pass any judgement on it. But the community is portraying it as such, and seem to have some sort of false illusions about it without really having proof (just like the way in which virtually every country who had a communist revolution acted before the revolution, followed quickly by a chatostrophic depression. go read "House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende if you don't get what I'm saying)
Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such. Proprietary doesn't mean bad. Open doesn't necessarily mean good. (Open USUALLY IS good, but good is not necessarily open).
What it comes down to in the end is that if something does something well at a low cost (cost is not always releated to money) , it is good. For example, AFAIK, Symbian OS does its job really well at the expense of money and a small loss of freedom. On the other hand, Linux doesn't do as good of a job with regard to mobile phones, but is free, and allows more freedom. To the phone makers, the balance of costs and benefits seen in Symbian makes it a better product.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose