“Thanks to Nokia’s consistently piss-poor hardware choices and Symbian’s lack of ability to even remotely compete in terms of features, abilities, and overall experience, I’ve lost my passion for both…” These are the words of a Symbian fanboy Ricky Cadden from Symbian-Guru.com. Any heart-felt feelings about the Symbian/Nokia collaboration have turned sour. Can Nokia come up with a re-vamped OS in time to retain a claim to any of the smartphone market?
Nokia, once a world leader, is losing popularity to rising stars like Android and iOS. They crashed down to a 40% market share from 70%, in just two years. The credit for these shocking stats has to go to Nokia’s bad choice of operating system. Nokia have too many OS components to look after: Java, lots of Symbian versions, Maemo and now MeeGo in the pipeline. Instead of splitting its attention between these, Nokia should have taken a lesson from Apple and Google and instead focused on a single comprehensive OS.
Symbian was once a flourishing choice, two years ago enjoying more than 50% of control over the smartphone segment. Back then as Android was am open source baby and Windows Mobile was the only other choice left for leading smartphone manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and LG. Then Apple and Google, companies that had no previous experience in building operating systems for smartphones, came up with iOS and Android respectively. The existence of Symbian was challenged by the rising popularity of these newbies.
Symbian’s future is now reliant on the success of the Symbian^3 platform. The N8 handset is the first Symbian^3 phone, catching headlines for its large display, 12MP camera, and the mini HDMI port more than for its operating system. Symbian^3 is definitely a huge improvement over earlier Symbian versions, but it’s still trailing behind the sleek interface and applications of iOS and Android. Android and iOS seems to be doing everything Symbian promised but failed to achieve in a decade of existence.
Symbian previous success relied on the strong backing from the top three contributors of the Symbian Foundation, namely Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Now Sony and Samsung have decided to move away from the sinking Symbian ship. “As for Symbian, Samsung is still a board member of the foundation. However, it doesn't seem to be quite impressed with Symbian^3 and there is high possibility that it might skip Symbian^3 altogether and opt for Symbian^4 directly when it is released. Samsung also revealed that it currently doesn't see "visible demand" for the platform. The last Symbian device from Samsung was the Omnia HD released well over a year ago, in early 2009.”- Techtree.
Nokia has taken the charge for Symbian, says CTO Rich Green. “Nokia will continue to invest in the development of the Symbian platform; and we plan to make the software available to the Symbian ecosystem via an alternative, direct and open model. Developers can expect more rapid innovations for the Symbian platform, occurring in a timely and iterative manner …”
The resignation of executive director Lee Williams for "personal reasons" and the sacking of 1800 workers at Nokia, mostly from its Symbian unit, is more than a coincidence. Nokia also hinted at the closure of the Symbian Foundation by trimming its role from developing the platform to only licensing-based operations. Nokia has also canceled the development of separate Symbian^4.
Nokia is committed to evolve the Symbian platforms, but the OS will be taking a back seat, being featured on only low-end Nokia phones so that Nokia can focus more on MeeGo in its high-end models. “Nokia recently said that the Nokia N8 would be the last of the N-series phones to use Symbian. Going forward, N-series phones will be powered by MeeGo. While Nokia is committing resources to open sourcing Symbian and has been the biggest Symbian user, it has said that it would start using MeeGo to power its high-end phones.”- ComputerWorld.
Actually I am pleased to hear that Nokia chose MeeGo, a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin operating systems. To Nokia’s dismay, Intel has announced that MeeGo will not be available on smartphones until 2011. There still isn’t much information from HP about the Palm OS and there hasn’t been much of a positive response to Windows Mobile 7; this leaves the mobile OS war with only two strong warriors: Android and iOS. With these OS constantly bringing new versions, advanced updates, and more apps than each community really even needs, it will be hard for MeeGo to compete if it’s going to be arriving so late into the arena.
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