4 ms·

From the 'too little, too late' department...

jbm 17y ago
To gain market share, maybe; but there are an insane number of devices running Symbian. This might allow us to do some interesting tinkering. Speaking of Symbian - I remember an entire floor at Fujitsu's building in Musashi Kosugi in Kawasaki was completely locked down; no in or out without special clearance. That entire section was devoted to coding in Symbian, and they had some proprietary information about the OS from Nokia about the system.
- lanstein 17y ago
  This move may well be more relevant to non-US-centric development, especially markets like Finland.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Try most of Europe, where Nokias are still way more common than iPhone or Android.
    - plinkplonk 17y ago
      Not to mention India, the fastest growing largest mobile phone market in the world. Nokia is still dominant here.
scw 17y ago
I agree, it reminds me of Netscape's decision to spin off their code base into open-source Mozilla. Arguably the web benefited greatly from this decision, but at the time it produced a four year delay in a new version at a time Microsoft was rapidly releasing new versions of IE: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
shmichael 17y ago
Nokia still has 3 times more smartphones in the market than Apple, apparently. http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-sorry-apple-we-beat-you-by-mile.html http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-sorry-apple...
- munctional 17y ago
  The US market, while high in visibility, is largely irrelevant in the global scope. Nokia has a massive install base.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    Massive install base, yet no hype. There's more hype for Nokia's Linux phone than for any random Symbian smartphone. I coded for Symbian many years ago -- it's a dead end. The OS literally has no future. Open sourcing it is just part of the death spiral. At least this might give some of the dedicated developers, whomever are left, a chance to actually fix some of the more annoying bugs.
    - munctional 17y ago
      I have the N900. It replaced my E71. The Skype integration is amazing. :-) I agree that Symbian is a dead end. I have two books on Symbian development, and Symbian's bizarre form of C++ and their relatively complex code signing system drove me away from the platform. With the N900 as a vanguard, I'm excited to see just how far Nokia can take its open, Linux-based smartphones.
      - parbo 17y ago
        With Symbian being open sourced, what are the chances of getting a virtual Symbian device going on the N900?
        Tuna-Fish 17y ago
        Pretty low unless someone is willing to put a lot of money into it. The problem with Symbian is gazillion bizarre corner cases and exceptional situations -- this makes it hard to develop for, and also makes making a proper emulator very work-intensive.
jdietrich 17y ago
Nonsense. It might be 'too little, too late' to take on the iPhone, but it's timed perfectly for the real market for mobile phones. It's easy to forget that there are an estimated four billion GSM subscribers worldwide, most of whom neither know nor care about Android or the iPhone. The global mobile OS market is currently dominated by Nucleus, OSE and Series 40 - these three platforms have a combined market share of 90%. For Series 40 users, the obvious upgrade path is Series 60 - of course Nokia will lose many of these customers, but they will keep many more. That leaves us with the myriad manufacturers using Nucleus and OSE. These manufacturers, many of them completely unknown in the west, are producing featurephones for customers who are highly price sensitive and are staggeringly fickle and fashion-led. When looking for an upgrade path to a full smartphone OS, the main concern of these manufacturers will be cost - of implementation and of Bill of Materials. Symbian has clear advantages over other smartphone platforms in this respect, being royalty-free and having significantly lower hardware requirements than Android. An open code base will open the door to these Chinese manufacturers and their dizzying diversity of hardware and software designs. I reckon that the Symbian Foundation has played an absolute blinder here - it may have lost North America, but it still has a dominant position in EMEA and has set itself up perfectly to launch an aggressive assault on BRIC.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives? Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially partly because of that. If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback). Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are successfully using? There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
  - 17y ago

jbm 17y ago

To gain market share, maybe; but there are an insane number of devices running Symbian. This might allow us to do some interesting tinkering. Speaking of Symbian - I remember an entire floor at Fujitsu's building in Musashi Kosugi in Kawasaki was completely locked down; no in or out without special clearance. That entire section was devoted to coding in Symbian, and they had some proprietary information about the OS from Nokia about the system.

lanstein 17y ago
This move may well be more relevant to non-US-centric development, especially markets like Finland.
- davidw 17y ago
  Try most of Europe, where Nokias are still way more common than iPhone or Android.
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    Not to mention India, the fastest growing largest mobile phone market in the world. Nokia is still dominant here.

scw 17y ago

I agree, it reminds me of Netscape's decision to spin off their code base into open-source Mozilla. Arguably the web benefited greatly from this decision, but at the time it produced a four year delay in a new version at a time Microsoft was rapidly releasing new versions of IE: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

shmichael 17y ago

Nokia still has 3 times more smartphones in the market than Apple, apparently. http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-sorry-apple-we-beat-you-by-mile.html http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-sorry-apple...

munctional 17y ago
The US market, while high in visibility, is largely irrelevant in the global scope. Nokia has a massive install base.
- wvenable 17y ago
  Massive install base, yet no hype. There's more hype for Nokia's Linux phone than for any random Symbian smartphone. I coded for Symbian many years ago -- it's a dead end. The OS literally has no future. Open sourcing it is just part of the death spiral. At least this might give some of the dedicated developers, whomever are left, a chance to actually fix some of the more annoying bugs.
  - munctional 17y ago
    I have the N900. It replaced my E71. The Skype integration is amazing. :-) I agree that Symbian is a dead end. I have two books on Symbian development, and Symbian's bizarre form of C++ and their relatively complex code signing system drove me away from the platform. With the N900 as a vanguard, I'm excited to see just how far Nokia can take its open, Linux-based smartphones.
    - parbo 17y ago
      With Symbian being open sourced, what are the chances of getting a virtual Symbian device going on the N900?
      - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
        Pretty low unless someone is willing to put a lot of money into it. The problem with Symbian is gazillion bizarre corner cases and exceptional situations -- this makes it hard to develop for, and also makes making a proper emulator very work-intensive.

jdietrich 17y ago

Nonsense. It might be 'too little, too late' to take on the iPhone, but it's timed perfectly for the real market for mobile phones. It's easy to forget that there are an estimated four billion GSM subscribers worldwide, most of whom neither know nor care about Android or the iPhone. The global mobile OS market is currently dominated by Nucleus, OSE and Series 40 - these three platforms have a combined market share of 90%. For Series 40 users, the obvious upgrade path is Series 60 - of course Nokia will lose many of these customers, but they will keep many more. That leaves us with the myriad manufacturers using Nucleus and OSE. These manufacturers, many of them completely unknown in the west, are producing featurephones for customers who are highly price sensitive and are staggeringly fickle and fashion-led. When looking for an upgrade path to a full smartphone OS, the main concern of these manufacturers will be cost - of implementation and of Bill of Materials. Symbian has clear advantages over other smartphone platforms in this respect, being royalty-free and having significantly lower hardware requirements than Android. An open code base will open the door to these Chinese manufacturers and their dizzying diversity of hardware and software designs. I reckon that the Symbian Foundation has played an absolute blinder here - it may have lost North America, but it still has a dominant position in EMEA and has set itself up perfectly to launch an aggressive assault on BRIC.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago
What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives? Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially partly because of that. If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback). Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are successfully using? There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
- 17y ago