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 🙂
