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

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Apple’s mobile platform remains popular, and its devices accounted for nearly 43% of all U.S. ad requests. The report also broke down requests by region, and estimated that 54% of the 45 million iPhone and iPod Touch users were in the United States.

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