Big companies join Symbian Foundation, let slip the dogs of OHA!
Following Google’s footsteps, Nokia and Symbian are really pushing forward with R&D by taking in several huge companies to gain access to Symbian. Notable companies include ARM, Visa, and Huawei amongst 52 companies that have expressed their interest in joining the Symbian Foundation. With such a huge following, the software and platform potential could create a formidable force to rival Google’s Android OS. Nokia plans on buying out all shareholders of Symbian for $410 million and make their goods royalty-free… way to go, Nokia! Profits from Symbian will go to the Symbian Foundation in order to support its efforts to create an open-source platform. Symbian Foundation software should be making its debut some time in 2009 with a fully operational platform in 2010. It’s nice to see the telecom industry team up with other companies and embrace the open-source nature of things.
Should be interestoing. Nokia might have a slight advantage over google here. If this goes through Nokia would be the maker of the hardware and software while Google has to find others to make harware since they only makes the android OS. I am interested if this might effect other phone using symbian software such as the Ericcsons.
Google will have about a year ahead of Nokia. I would expect they will get a large following from the developers. Besides who’s to say google won’t just by a phone maker?
i think i would tend to agree with jdslim more. google has smart engineers no doubt, but there are slight differences between writing a linux kernel and baking a phone os which should give nokia an edge over google’s headstart.
Um – google would be AHEAD of Nokia? Nokia’s had ~4 years to do what google had the INITIATIVE to do. Nokia phones are always slow and have crapy looking user interfaces. I’ve owned the E71, E90, N71 and so on. Fail. I wish they worked better, but they don’t. Once a phone has threaded messaging with delivery/read reports, email integration, contact management, call quality, internet speed… its pretty much done. I’ve never had a phone that did everything just right… and I anticipate that changing with the GPhone; I’ll post tomorrow after I get it.
I still think Nokia is the one to beat here even though I’ve never used any of their phones. They have the largest smartphone marketshare and the most money…they’ll win in the end.
Symbian OS is the smartphone market leader, not a Android rival. And they can’t be following in Google’s footsteps in R&D when they’ve led the industry in that for years, too. Nokia isn’t the only Symbian device maker, and won’t be the only Symbian Foundation device maker. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung, and Motorola are all Symbian device makers, and founding members of the Symbian Foundation, so they already have the leaders of device manufacturing signed up, unlike Android, which is just gaining participants.
Nokia holds the overwhelming developer community lead, with the entire Symbian, c++, Python, Mscript, Qt, Flashlite, Java, S60WRT and Web2.0 developers all continuing to contribute applications for years and to come.
The Symbian OS is a full fledged OS, so isn’t for everyone. And initial impressions on early release devices versus present updated firmware will prove no smartphone maker has more stable devices with near the power of S60 devices, especially the E90, E71, N82, N95 8gb, and 5800 XpressMusic.
But I expect Android to prevail alongside Symbian, and others like RIM and WinMo to combine or suffer.