Smart Move for Smartphones
June 24, 2008
Big news from Espoo, Finland...long pause (it's a sentence I don't get to type all that often, so I'm reveling in it). Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia has announced that it has launched a bid to buy Symbian, the developer of the world's most widely used operating system for mobile devices. Price tag? Around 410 million dollars.
OK, big enough news, but as they say, "Wait! There's more!" Nokia also announced, in partnership with a whole host of big mobile players like AT&T, LG, and Motorola, the creation of something called the Symbian Foundation. The idea behind the foundation is take the Symbian platform, and open it up to development. According to the newly created foundation, they expect some four billion people to be using mobile devices globally by 2010, and they note that "for many of these people, their mobile will be their first Internet experience, not just their first camera, music player or phone."
"Open software is the basic building block for delivering this future," reads the Symbian Foundation's first ever press release. To that end, the foundation will release the Symbian OS under an Eclipse public license, and let developers go to work on it.
Symbian is already used in about two-thirds of all smartphones. What exactly makes a phone so smart? Depends on who you ask, but I'd say it's one that functions just as much like a computer as a phone.
Not surprisingly, Nokia's move comes at a busy time for the smartphone market, what with Microsoft pushing Windows Mobile, and Apple's new 3G iPhone making headlines. Apple, normally fairly stingy when it comes to letting folks mash-up its products, opened up a bit recently with its iPhone SDK, much to the delight of developers.
But the real competition Nokia's eyeing here might be from Google's Android project. Like Nokia and the others hope to do with Symbian, Google opened up a platform for a mobile operating system where anyone, theoretically, can play in the sandbox. But Android's being built from scratch, and has run into some accompanying growing pains. Symbian is already a proven and widely used mobile platform, which may well give it the edge, at least in the short to medium term.
I look at all of this from a consumer's point of view. Any developments that will push mobile computing forward, and do so in open ways that lead to greater choice for me, is a good thing. Let's have as many mobile operating systems and applications competing for my business as possible, and let's have handset makers just give us the handsets, and let us choose what we want to run on them.
And let's hope that developments in mobile operating systems will convince service providers that it's time to really start rolling out faster, third generation (3G) mobile networks, so that these operating systems can be used to their fullest.
At a press conference in London today, Nokia reps said that a handset with a new Symbian Foundation platform could be available by 2010. Google Android is hoping to be on some handsets late this year.
Wow, a near future when I will be able to just take my cellphone on business trips, and can leave the laptop at home? Call me when it's a reality.
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