“The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn’t already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model,” says DeviceGuru.
Nokia Buys Symbian: So What?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Now that OS X has been shipping on the ARM for a year, Android shold be out soon enough (ha!), and Windows CE approaches usability….
Does it matter?
The real truth is, that if Microsoft had ported even NT 4.0 to the ARM it’d be a real player.
The real fun will start when the Atom cpu starts shipping in phones.
In the end Nokia will do what it does now… nurture it’s antiquated OS, to the masses, you know the ones that just ‘make calls’… It will be a long time before they die out. But it’ll be a slow and protracted death marked with lots of blunders.
It reminds me a lot of Novell.
You do know that Intel Atom is nowhere as power efficient as ARM based processors? They won’t be shipping Atom based mobile phones for quite a while (unless you want a phone with 5 h standby).
Those atom phones are marked for late next year.
It’s coming!
ReactOS is currently being ported to ARM, which should become interesting
Has anybody else noted the fact that Nokia hasn’t comitted to opening a single line of code until at least 2010… This seems more aimed at generating buzz than anything else. If they were serious about saving Symbian, they would dump the code right now, Mozilla-style.
* LiMO (Does anyone actually sell these? Where?)
* Android (Now, if only there was a phone that runs this framework that only OSS geeks have ever heard.)
* Windows Mobile (Get ready to run Vista Mobile)
* iPhone (Even Scientology is reasonable in comparison to Apple)
* Symbian (Just you wait what mobile giants come up with)
Now that Nokia can cram QT into Symbian and break most of existing code with major updates without caring for UIQ, Symbian could get interesting.
There’s a third to this party: OpenMoko has just started shipping the second edition of their phone, which is as open as it’s going to get.
Sure, not all aspects of the phone are equally impressive, and the software still needs a lot of work, but these guys are really going ‘all the way’ openness-wise, encouraging hackability instead of grudgingly tolerating it.
Nokia^aEURTMs commitment to open-source Symbian does turn Windows Mobile into the ^aEURoeodd man out^aEUR ^aEUR” the only major mobile phone OS that^aEURTMs not available under a genuine open source license.
Presumably Symbian has some patents that Nokia is interested in
Ease of development is key to the success of any software platform. I personally rank Symbian at the bottom of all the alternatives mentionned. I am convinced in the end it will fail and gradually become outdated because of this.