Last June Nokia announced its plans to go open source with the Symbian platform. Already handed over to the Symbian Foundation, the smartphone OS that currently powers over 300million handsets has been battling it out with the Apple iPhone, Android OS and others in the race to be the smartest mobile OS. It announced today that the Symbian OS is now open sourced (and free), full 4 months before schedule. This opens the door for Symbian to be ported on other mobile devices like netbooks, tablets or perhaps even PMPs.
While we heard since years that mobile is the future, mobile is the future … the fact remains that true smartphone capabilities were tested only by the iPhone in 2007 and since then we have seen newer platforms like the Android and WebOS steal the show with nothing competitive being presented by Symbian / Nokia. Nokia is one of the most efficient mobile manufacturers in the world and still the largest globally, but the loss of mindshare to the competition is significant. Samsung has climbed up to the number 2 slot globally and might well be knocking on Nokia’s door. The enterprise market is ruled by Blackberry and powerusers are diehard Android / iPhone lovers. How long can Nokia survive on the common man? As a matter of fact most common users use a decade old WinXP on their desktop, but when it comes to mobile the industry is moving fast, unbelievable fast!
Nokia avoided the Google backed Android OS in favor of Maemo (not to forget that they are also working on oFono with Intel). This has made many to term the OS strategy by Nokia as “Confused”. However Samsung has been offering everything that one can expect, low end phones with its own non-smart OS (some on the other side aswell), Windows Mobile & Android smartphones and an upcoming BADA OS. So will Symbian manages to turn the tables with the ambitious move to go Open, we hope to see Nokia deliver some new wine
“The day broadband is down at my place, I hardly switch it on my computer.” – that’s what I said back in July and with today’s preview of Chrome OS, that’s exactly what inspires Google to work on this project. We are about to use Netbooks as NETbooks finally.
Here are a few notes from what Google revealed about the Chrome OS today:
In a recent interview with Cnet Andy Rubin (Director of Mobile Platforms @ Google) discussed the open source mobile platform Android. Here are a few excerpts:
Andy revealed that Android will adapt to chinese users by offering stylus operation. Would that mean resistive touchscreens? or special styluses with UI tweak?
“If somebody wants to use Android to build a Yahoo phone, great.”
Google Phone? like Palm or iPhone? “Controlling the whole device is great, (but) we’re talking about 4 billion handsets. When you control the whole device the ability to innovate rapidly is pretty limited when it’s coming from a single vendor.”
Why aren’t there many Androids in the market yet? “It takes about 18 months to build a phone from end to end. What we wanted to do for our market entry was make sure that we had one successful showcase product to prove that the product was reliable and robust and ready to go. We chose HTC as our partner for that.”
“it’s absolutely 100 percent free, it’s complete, it’s everything you need to build a phone”
Android is not full open source, with the source being available to anyone and everyone for FREE.
Today, Google and the Open Handset Alliance announced the availability of the Android platform source code to everyone, for free, under the new Android Open Source Project. This represents the first truly open and fully featured mobile platform which will enable people to create a mobile device without restrictions, build applications that run on Android powered devices, and contribute to the core platform.
Since almost a year we are speaking about the Google Phone aka Android platform. Google realizes that the handheld’s market will offer tremendous growth in the coming years, and Android will ensure that it holds a good share of the mobile market. Data usage on mobile devices is on a rise and most telecom companies estimate that in coming years the Data revenue would be much more than what it is today.
We also saw some preview videos and spy shots, but here we now have a better idea of what the Android holds for us (+Video):
Google recently demoed the HTC Dream at a conference which highlighted the potential of Android platform. The HTC dream is a big device with a 5″x3″ touch screen, a slider keyboard and a accelerometer like the iPhone which lets your tilt the device for navigation or scrolling. But that shouldn’t give you the impression that all Android devices are going to be high-end touchscreen. In a previous demo we have already seen (Video Downstairs) that the Android would come in different types ranging from QWERTY, normal number pad with trackball or a touch like iPhone.
Many manufacturers are developing devices for the Android and by 2008 end we would start to see the announcements. The heart of a Android device is its Open Source nature. The hardware is merely a facilitator of what is being developed, the software offers the real GOLD. We also hear rumors that Google would offer a app store for Android users to get their hands on the latest applications and innovations. (more…)
Last June Nokia announced its plans to go open source with the Symbian platform. Already handed over to the Symbian Foundation, the smartphone OS that currently powers over 300million handsets has been battling it out with the Apple iPhone, Android OS and others in the race to be the smartest mobile OS. It announced today that the Symbian OS is now open sourced (and free), full 4 months before schedule. This opens the door for Symbian to be ported on other mobile devices like netbooks, tablets or perhaps even PMPs.
