Rumors: Nokia disappointed with Symbian, moving to Maemo
The Financial Times Deutschland is reporting that Nokia is losing confidence in the Symbian OS facing the competition with Apple, Android and RIM. An undisclosed source in Nokia told FTD that the new Smartphones will now be shipped with the new Maemo OS that was recently developed by Nokia.
Only a year after the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia for 264 Million Euro, and a few months after the creation of the Symbian Foundation, Nokia feels that its time to move forward to better compete with the new open OS competitors. The Symbian code, which is based on the Psion OS from the 90’s, is said to have about 20 million lines of code, and is almost as complex as Windows XP. The Maemo OS was developed for the Nokia Internet tablets, and is based mainly on open source code, coming from the Debian GNU/Linux. It is slimmer, faster and more modern than the Symbian platform. A first Maemo-based smartphone is expected to be released within a few weeks.
According to Gartner, Symbian’s market share has fallen from 56.9% in Q1 of 2008 to 49.3% percent in Q1 this year, while RIM increased their market share of the BlackBerry platform from 13.3% to 19.9% percent, and Apple’s iPhone OS market share grow from 5.3% to 10.8%. The young Android platform market share was still only 1.6% in Q1, but is growing fast.
Will this move erase Symbian from the Mobile OS landscape? The Symbian Foundation team in London claims not to be worried. In any case, they say, most of the Nokia smartphones are and will be for the next few years, based on Symbian. They also indicate the cooperation with Sony Ericsson, that should have a large portion of their smartphones on Symbian as well.
Will this move help to keep Nokia in a leading position? Here the answer is more complex. I believe that this move alone will not make the change. Nokia will need to constantly adapt to the fast changing market, and to offer a wide array of applications and a large and active developers community.
Source (in German): http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Strategiewende-Nokia-verliert-Vertrauen-zu-Symbian/551805.html
Rafi Ton said:
There is also a rumor that MS is looking to buy Palm. I guess it is evident that mobile os built 10 years ago cannot match the os built from scratch using touch and more recent technologies.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Yoad Gidron said:
If this is true, it would be quite a desperate act for Nokia. Taking into account the large market share of Symbian and the amount of applications, I believe that Nokia will make an effort to improve the UI of S60 in order to compete with iPhone, Android and the like.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Lior said:
I think that a shift to a more flexible platform is necessary.Until a couple of years ago, Symbian was the most robust platform around, but this is no longer the case (although it is still very strong). Nokia must make a shift to fight the competition, but again – changing the OS is not enough and must be accompanied by a supporting developers community, and proper distribution channel. The shift will obviously not be immediate, but must start immediately.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
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