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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.
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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.
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?"
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.