Do Not Discount Symbian Just Yet
filed in News & Stuff, Nokia Qwerty on Nov.27, 2008
The Finnish mobile giant Nokia just revealed that it is intended to acquire the remaining scattered shares in Symbian OS and would start unifying all the Symbian sub-technologies into one big open source platform. Under the term of sub-technologies I understand MOAP, Series 60 and UIQ - the offsprings of Symbian that have gone different paths of development during the years.
Nokia is not alone in this quest - it is joined by Sony Ericsson, Motorola, DoCoMo and possibly Ben-Q. It seems that Motorola is really keen on open source ideas. If you remember, they are throwing large sums of money into Android open source platform development team, now there’s Symbian too. Back in 2003 Motorola sold its initial Symbian shares to Psion and Nokia. Now they’re back on board. What is that - a bad management?
Ben-Q’s role remains unclear. Siemens Mobile bought a part of Symbian OS cake in 2004, Ben-Q bought Siemens. However, Ben-Q didn’ inherit the Siemens’ stake in Symbian. I imagine that Ben-Q would be delighted to take part in this mission while their P30 phone is using UIQ technology.
The most exciting part of this mission will probably be merging S60 platform into Symbian OS open source final version. S60 allows to develop applications in Java, C++ and Flash. Imagine, possibilities are endless!
The only thing I am afraid of is that Symbian would become too heavy and consume too much memory. I hope Nokia knows what is the right thing. Result might be a healthy competition to Android and other popular mobile platforms. I cannot wait to see the enhanced Symbian in action!
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