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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.
Why does GPL have anything to do with how good an OS can/could be? Jeebus...
Oh thats great ... 63% of cell phones will now by N-Gage'd!!!
I read at as Sybian.
Perhaps they're going to revamp the vibrator function of their cellphones afterall?!
So does this make Nokia the enemy now?
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
Sure its still proprietary, but it is another option.
"...does Linux now have an edge?"
No, No, No, NO! This has been discussed so many times it is unbelievable. Linux on your handheld is for people who want to run X apps remotely, ssh into their routers/servers etc. It is NOT (yet) for folk who want to simply write e-mail, update a calendar, play games and synchronise with a windows machine. Sorry, but it just isn't ready for this market area yet. Every year we hear how "200x is year of the Linux desktop" and every year we get excuses, lack of support from big vendors and API change problems which make porting apps a nightmare.
What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).
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!
Funny, when I first read the posting I had an image of women on their new humming pleasure phones...One more place mobile phones probably don't belong.
-AP
Yeah, and follow the link and you see it's Symbians own webpage that says it's the better. Are peoples bullshit detectors broken when it comes to M$ competitors these days?
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!
Perhaps they're going to revamp the vibrator function of their cellphones afterall?!
:-)
like this?
I think this is very good for Linux, Any manufacturers who are looking to develop any new handheld technology,but do not want to be tied to any corporation like MS and Nokia will opt for linux - and even though they have a large market share, Nokia aren't completly dominant in the Phone/Handheld market.
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
Siemens, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, et al (see former ownershop smybian) are all ambitious mobile phone companies. They would be completely dependant on Nokia if they exclusively chose Symbian a.k.a. Nokia Series 60/70.
...
Instead they'll expand their technological portfolio.
Current situation: nearly no M$ smartphones (except some models from motorola), mostly symbian dominated market.
Possible future situation: M$ *and* Symbian phones from Siemens, Samsung,
Conclusion: M$ is the lucky winner.
Damn.
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.
Having used both types of handset before, I personally feel that the Symbian OS is more user friendly, and better. But ulimately, I believe consumers usually take more into consideration the phone design, weight, stylish factor....than the OS features. As much as I would love to buy a linux phone, it first has to appeal to me in terms of looks and design, and the easy availibility of third party apps.
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
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.'"
The problem is that Samsung and Siemens are now essentially being asked to license an OS from, and pay fees to, their largest competitor. As Microsoft just makes software, not the actual phones, it is not seen as a competitor in the same way, and licensing Windows Mobile may not be such a bitter pill to swallow.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
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.
Last year, it was already obvious that Nokia (who controlled the Symbian UI) would become the primary vendor for Symbian itself.
Motorola tried Microsoft, decided they did not like it, and started to build Linux phones.
This is going to be a three way fight between Symbian, Linux, and Microsoft. My guess is that Symbian will win because it is a superb platform and Nokia have timed this move perfectly.
Linux will beat Microsoft because anyone who is unwilling to pay the Nokia license fees for Symbian is unlikely to want to pay Microsoft either.
But this does not really change things for firms like Samsung - they will probably be happy to ue a standardized UI and OS while also developing their Linux platform on the side.
The big loser here is Microsoft, who might have fragmented a Symbian owned by several people, but are unlikely to score a good hit now.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
For example take the entire hypothetical situation in which the OS on which your business depended suddenly becomes under the control of your business rival.
Wouldn't it have been nice to have your own OS, or at least an open one. Or you can just trust that your business rival will play fair and make sure that the OS can be made to work on your platform. It could happen.
I own both a Nokia 3650 and a Sony-Ericsson P800 and I strongly prefer UIQ. Last I looked Nokia and Sony-Ericsson were competitors. Does this bode well for the future of Symbian/UIQ phones?
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Sadly, interest in things being open source is transitioning (my cynical colleagues might say it already has) from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about religion.
In my experience (working in the financial industry), it goes more like: Happily, interest in things being open source is transitioning from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about security from being held hostage by ones vendor.
In other words, businesses are recognizing the concern and need to have the freedom to conduct their business without coercion from outside, i.e. they are recognizing the value of freedom as being of even greater importance than the cooperative, peer-review paradigm that improves quality.
This is an important breakthrough in corporate mentality, and I have seen it spreading rather quickly among the suits of late.
Strategicly, software freedom (particularly at the infrastructure level such as an operating system) is very important to an enterprise: not just from the orphaning of software your comment implies, but from other forms of vendor lock-in and coercion, be it coercive upgrade cycles that disrupt one's business, security patches that sabatoge competitors products one's enterprise may be using (by submarining in incompatible DLLs, for example), and by having a mission critical, proprietary product yanked when one's vendor suddenly becomes one's competitor.
I've seen all of these things happen, and I suspect Siemens et. al. are very cognizant of this as well. These are scenerios that GPLed software does a great job of protecting against, BSD-licensed software protects against to a lesser degree, and proprietary products leave one completely vulnerable to.
There may be very compelling strategic reasons for these companies to switch to a (currently) inferior GPLed product over a proprietary product rather than risk having their mission critical vendor (Nokia today, Microsoft tommorrow) becoming their most ruthless adversary...reasons that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "religion."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
does Linux now have an edge?
Only if it's a superior OS in terms of compatability, usability, and cutting-edge features. Please remember that on the whole, consumers don't care which phone is more open from a codebase perspective, only whether it supports the features they want.
Nokia is a Finnish company.
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.
What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).
Yes, this is exactly what I meant. If a big phone company -- say, Siemens or Samsung -- wants to compete without licensing Symbian or whatever Microsoft's portable OS is called today, pretty much the only option (other that slugging it out alone and dying a painful death) would be to use GPL software like Linux. Sure, it would take a lot of work to make it match the latest Symbian, but that's not the target market: the cheaper price becomes more attractive in the lower segment, where you don't really need all that much in the way of UI software. And then that can grow incrementally the way GPL projects do.
And FWIW, I have a brand-new Nokia 6600 with Symbian... and underneath the pretty chrome, the GUI is painfully slow, maldesigned and crash-prone.
Cheers,
-j.
Oh please. One of my co-workers actually bought one of those things about a year back. The damn thing is huge. Seriously, it's larger than the original analog AMPS cell phone I had ten years ago. It's an interesting technology demo, sure, but not something that any actual human being would want to cart around and use.
:)
I think he actually cried when I showed him my Treo 270. Then he bought one himself.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
- 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.