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Nokia Reasserts Control Over Symbian OS
jfruhlinger writes "Nokia is asserting its control over the Symbian OS that runs many of its smartphones, taking the tasks of developing the operating system away from the independent Symbian Foundation, which will now focus on licensing and intellectual property issues. Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS."
After reading a different mobile phone thread on Slashdot, someone mentioned how much they loved their Nokia N900. I picked one up after that, and I absolutely love it. I even managed to put NES/SNES/Genesis/C-64 emulators on it, and paired a PS3 controller to it, good times. It supports skype / google video calls, and uses wifi. It's the most modern phone I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I enjoy it :P
I have a n900 for personal use and an iphone for work.
The n900 is a decent phone but is starting to fall behind. The open source of it is nice, but doesn't make up for the flaws.
Little out of touch (see what I did there?) are you?
Maybe you should visit their website some day?
They are still the 800 pound gorilla in the cell industry. Just because you don't see them much in the USA, don't make the mistake of dismissing them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You mean those stable easy to use no frills just work everywhere days on a battery nokia's?
Well, unless you're into the Google maps latitude facebook youtube pinging skype goatse there's this thingy with which you can talk to other people without software disruptions or lag. Only 20-30 bucks.
Market share is an iffy thing - it's here one day, gone the next. Unfortunately the Symbian adoption is not only slowing, it's negative (I say unfortunately because you can pry my beloved E72 out of my clammy, dead fingers.) Hopefully Nokia will be able to turn it around.
They will only be a problem for Apple if they start to siphon significant developers away from Apple, Android, and Blackberry. They might be a problem for Windows Phone 7 though. That could be a battle.
They sell more phones than anybody, but not when you look at individual segments. For the smartphone market, they aren't doing very well and I really don't see what they can do to turn that around. Fantastic hardware isn't enough. In fact, I would say fantastic marketing is more important than engineering.
I've been following the Meego 1.1 release news (I enjoyed http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/11/the-meego-progress-report-a-or-d/), and have read up on a few other Nokia stories (N8 reviews, rumored N9 devices, etc.) and I don't quite understand what their long run goals with Symbian are. I mostly read bad opinions of it, e.g. Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/14/nokia-n8-review/) loved certain aspects of the N8's hardware but didn't like the software. Symbian is probably the main thing keeping me from getting an N8 (that and the screen is disappointing). Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego. Phones are always getting more capable and I imagine the Meego stack will be optimized going forward, so how many interesting phones going forward are even going to run Symbian?
Given that Meego isn’t ready, I could be a lot more interested in Symbian if Nokia released hardware that they promise will support Meego when 1.2 is released, but for now runs Symbian. I was hoping that would be the case with the N8 since I really like the camera on that phone, and it literally seems to have no competition right now, but I can find nothing online speculating that Meego will ever work on an N8. Going with a transition strategy would let them release more phones even though Meego isn’t really ready (I hope it is ready in Q1, but maybe it won’t be working all that well into Q4 or later.
One more gripe for Nokia - I sure hope they aren’t considering releasing an N9 with a camera that doesn’t match or supersede the N8. The leaks (which could be totally bogus) implied the camera was not as capable (smaller sensor size, no Zeiss, less pixels). What the hell. I’m not going to feel great about spending money on a Meego phone when older Symbian phones can outperform it in ANY area (GPS, call quality, speed, picture/video quality, you name it).
One big plug for Nokia - good job making offline map viewing a key part of Ovi Maps. One of the things I hate about my iPhone (and Android phones I’ve tried) is that getting Google to cache maps seems like a super pain - I don’t want to install third party programs just to be able to use this fancy piece of electronics with huge memory, nice display and a GPS as a stand-alone GPS. It is the main thing that got me to investigate Nokia as an option to move to from iPhone instead of Android. But I’m not really sure I can wait long enough for Meego and Symbian isn’t inspiring enough.