Nokia has today announced that they will be acquiring the remaining 52% of Symbian they don’t own and will be releasing the complete Symbian platform under the Eclipse open source license. Nokia have also announced the creation of the Symbian Foundation, which is an alliance of mobile vendors and application providers that any company can join.
And the incentive to use Android becomes even less. I guess Google will remain a one trick search pony.
I don’t know if that will make Android any less valuable. I would think that Android might be able to learn a lesson or two from Symbian.
I believe Android has a long life to live. None the less I love seeing any commercial product open sourced like this and I believe it only helps.
nailing google.
Although it’s good to see Symbian open sourced, I would have preferred the GPL as a license. And: Android isn’t dead – Symbian is still crap, no matter how open source it is!
If Android is a clean, useful and innovative mobile OS, mobile phone companies are still likely to use it.
Symbian is a horrible OS. With all of the competition out there now that is actually USEABLE (iPhone, Blackberry, the Android unknown), only the true fanboys (or people who have not tried other mobile operating systems) can back Symbian as a viable platform. I view this more as Nokia throwing it out in an act of desperation.
It would be nice if some inteligent OSS engineers got it working so the Nokia E61 doesn’t crash when trying to do anything. Maybe just implement some of the features that we all expect like predictive contact look ups from the main screen when you start typing a name or the brains to roam between wifi and GPRS without having to ask the user. However, I don’t think this is going to work out that way. I would place my bet on the OSS people looking more towards future development on Android rather than fixing Symbian.
Oh happy days…
I love to see open source is now a marketing advantage… bring on the OS symbian
clancy: once it is open source, expect that the ui layers will be ripped off and implemented better. things like ‘contact lookup’ are all just apps
I can confirm that – Symbian is a horrible OS. I hope Android will win the market!
If you can’t beat them, buy them.
Does anybody use Symbian these days ?
I hope making it open source can fetch Nokia some bucks
More open source movement will only lead to better applications and improved service benchmarks.
Rajeev Vashisht
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
Symbian is anyway too bad. Wonder what good will this do to Nokia…
What a great news! Apple and MS have a little trouble there…
Opening up Symbian gives us nothing. I hope people are not mistaking this move with S60 being open source.
This is GREAT news for the mobile phone marketplace.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months.
Jim Connolly
The Tech Blog
That’s a smart move consider that Nokia is very dependent of Symbian for its mobile phone business. Nokia to ensure of its survival of its Symbian-based mobile phone business has to play the same levelling field as its forthcoming competitors like JavaFX Mobile, Andriod, Flash Lite which their respective vendors will be open-sourcing the technology.
At least, Nokia can readiliy capitalizing on open source movement since they already has large users of Symbian-based phones unlike the competitors.
I like the open source bit. This is really great news and the platform could become better.
Who cares if they nail Google or not? They give us a great open source platform, Android is another one, the community should be happy, and if even if Google remains one trick search pony who’s going to shed a tear?
This is something like Nokia declaring war on Apple and Google (for iPhone and Android respectively). Interesting to see who wins at the end.
http://www.tech...ot.blogspot.com
Nice undertaking, good for the nets!
I am running a Nokia E90 (S60 ver3) and will stick to that long before I consider switcing to back to an MS based phone(again)… in fact I ditched my Tytan MS phone after only three weeks (hated the Tytan) and replaced it with an E90. Haven’t looked back!
Symbian does has some quircks… but so too does every other O/S.
I suspect the people most critical of symbian are not really that familiar with it.. my nokia n95 certainly has predictive contact lookups (not that this really all that much of a feature to begin with). wifi is more or less a dead feature anyway.. does anyone actually use GPRS data anymore? 3g data on my phone is nearly as fast as my home broadband.
Symbian is not perfect but it does have quite a lot going for it, not least that it controls nearly 50% of global smartphone marketshare to second place RIM’s meagre 12%. I still find it kind of funny that people can honestly ask “does anyone use Symbian these days?” when more than 10 million symbian smart phones were sold in Q1 this year alone… ?!
I think this sounds like something yahoo would do to save the company!!!
Cheers
http://www.crunchnow.com
I believe most people here are reading this news wrong. This isn’t the next wave of Symbian dominance. It’s Nokia washing their hands of it.
Anyone who has done Symbian development knows it’s a pain in the smelly zone. It’s not like there will be thousands of opensource developers queuing up to get their hands on this new beast. Symbian was certainly a viable product in its day with devices being more limited, but even Nokia must know it is less than perfect.
Perhaps some developers or, more likely, companies will get together and develop Symbian into the next big thing, but from where I am standing (a few hundred metres from Nokia’s head R&D centre), this is effectively Nokia getting rid of it in order to make way for their next new platform. A platform much more competitive with the iPhone and Android.
And no, I don’t have supreme inside knowledge. Just feeling where the wind is blowing.
Open sourcing it will be great! Off course Symbian is far from perfect. But iPhone has its quirks too: it is owned by a company that wants to control everything… Symbian has loads of programs, free and commercial, and thats a good thing. I assume more programs for the system will appear now!
they need to go open social to offer consumers and businesses a premium customizable personalized location based offering. custom email, custom subsites, custom location. what is nokias anchor web destination. there pillar of opportunity? lbs is great but to have a real digital presence you need to have a online strategy and place to call home. is plazes gonna be it? lets hope they have a strategy that combines online with mobile lbs services because the company that makes these two dance together the best……wins the game. remember the phone is not a phone anymore it is a locator. OpenSourceLocator.com http://www.kill...locator-network
The winner in this operation is SonyEricsson, that gets rid of their Symbian shares by selling to Nokia, are now is free to go Android.
Nokia is now alone with Symbian, an OS with really poor usability compared to iPhone, Blackberry or Android.
Nokia still don’t get it. “It is the usability, stupid.”
http://tech-tal...ll-dont-get-it/
Open source, open source! Checck it for some helpful business resource information http://www.read...ex.php?RTA=web2
Kristoffer Lawson. Interesting view – interested to know how Nokia buying the rest of the business is them washing their hands of it though. Are you saying that’s so they can sell it/rebuild it/scrap it?
Symbian had the best OS back when it was Epoc Psion MX5.. the way that thing was designed it kicked ass… in terms of usability, ease of use, GUI, visibility etc. From then it went downhill… however still leagues ahead of the MS Mobile Crap…
At the end Android will be remembered as a try, however as the nokia cto once said, every year there is a new mobile OS then we all go back to business….
At the end its all about daily crunch being able to support thousands of devices and keep it reliable, anyone can roll out a flashy OS but supporting it, keep it upgraded across the many hardware is 90% transpiration and 10% inspiration…
Now making Symbian opensource will pull the rug out of the many OSes out there including Android… with that move Nokia basically provided the last nail in Android’s coffin…
Kristopher Lawson… I think you are full of it. Why would they buy it when they want to get rid of it. Makes no sense whatsoever…. if you want to get rid of it, sell your share to someone else….
And howbeing located close to Noka’s R&D should give you more credibility I think you’d have to figure that one out yourself…
Open sourcing sounds great, but it seems likely that either Nokia will optimize the kernel for their phones (making others not want to use it), or the OS will fragment (reducing advantages of having a third-party OS).
Having a neutral party like Google maintain the OS may make more sense.
Any others here for banning #23?
WTF? Why is the people saying that Sybmian is a horrible OS? Are you inexperience developers or what? I know, it’s really hard to develop applications for Symbian; but once you get experience is a magnific OS.
Nokia just restructured in January. I think if there is any company that has the ability to change, its Nokia ( which was once a paper mil and started as a fish canning operation). They are making a lot of moves in the internet space with OVI and recently Plazes. I hope this move to buy the OS gives them the ability to improve the UI, the useability and drop some of the legacy things for fear of customer dis-satisfaction. Why is it that there is a software upgrade for European Nokia-e70’s and I can’t get it because I have a North America version?
Will the Open Source community please fix the freakin’ multiple-confirm (like I have to hit OK 3 times) just to get online already?
Symbian is like the old MacOS 9. And iPhone is OSX in terms of UI. What can you say?
OMG TechCrunch is again dominated by a bunch of US-centric amateurs who know nothing about mobile.
Symbian my dear American imbeciles owns 45% of the worldwide smartphone business. Nokia has 35% total market share overall.
Symbian is open source? Why in god’s name would a developer choose to work on a non-existent OS like Google when they have billions of phones out there with S60?
Android is done.
We will have Windows Mobile and iPhone compete against Symbian. Oh yeah, and a few techcrunchies lick-a$$es to continue using Android.
Arrington: this desevers a top headline, not some lousy let’s-quote-FT/WSJ-post.
Regardless of how easy it is to program for, Prdo is correct (despite his condescending tone), Symbian has an enormous share of the mobile phone market. This is game-changing news, regardless of what your allegiances are.
Open Source many not necessarily good for quality, but definitely good for popularity. Good move.
@32
Google? Neutral party? Give me some of the stuff you’ve been smoking. Google would be as much as neutral party as Apple is with the iPhone and Microsoft is with Windows Mobile.
Dream on, buddy. A publicly traded company cares about one, and one thing only: their shareholders. If Google was neutral how come they distort every single product they interfere with (e.g. no Live Search option in Google Toolbar, and many others???)
There are pre-dominantly three OS for the desk top – MacOS, Windows and Linux, what’s the consolidation prediction for the mobile phone?
Jimbo, Philip: Sorry, I did not mean to imply that being physically close means I would know any better than anyone else. It was meant to be just an interesting footnote.
Yes, my response was partly knee-jerk, and I believe Symbian will be with us for quite some time, much like they still sell S40 phones. However, I do believe Nokia will want to be moving away from Symbian in the long term, and quite rightly so. I know a lot of developers who have dealt with Symbian here, and I’ve done some work with it myself. It’s not a very loved platform at all. As it stands today, the iPhone platform and Android are more modern and developers love them.
So why buy it? For control. What companies do all the time when purchasing assets. It’s possible it might not have been possible to opensource it without buying it. It’s possible they are planning to completely rebuild the whole thing. Whatever the case, I’m not convinced opensource developers will be flocking to develop the core OS.
And, if you think about it, why should they? Nokia already has a multitasking device with a touchscreen, and that’s running Linux …
a- ha. okay. for what it’s worth, my view is that it’s bought it because it’s realised why the iPhone is so good – Apple controls device, operating system and software. Usability is reliant on all those things working seamlessly. I really don’t think anyone, including Nokia, would spend $400m on something to get rid.
Just posted about it more fully.
Who thinks we will see the Android Dalvik/Java API on the new open source Symbian OS one day?
It has the potential to be the best of both worlds – a mature, proven and complete 3G phone OS, with a great API for third parties.
our cell phone users will benefit more from open sources. just like iphone, google and nokia compete together, we smile