Symbian Seeks To Win Developer Mindshare
Following the news today that Symbian has gone open source, eWEEK Europe questions its strategy group leader John Forsyth about the way forward for the mobile operating system
The implication seems to be that Nokia will stick with Symbian for its mass market devices, but will opt for Maemo for its high end devices. Any thoughts?
I really don’t like to speak too much about vendor strategies, but Nokia were really honest on their capital markets day for analysts last December, when they said something along the lines of that Maemo has a place in certain categories but Symbian was their platform of choice for smartphones. We couldn’t have asked for a better quote.
Finally, Symbian of course used to be known as EPOC. Folklore says that EPOC stood for Electronic Piece of Cheese? True?
Laughs. “I couldn’t possibly comment, I really cannot confirm or deny it.”
The Analyst Viewpoint
“The move has been a long time coming, but the challenge for Symbian now is attracting other vendors to it,” said Pete Cunningham, senior analyst at research house Canalys, speaking to eWEEK Europe.
“We are seeing a lot of handset vendors rationalising on mobile operating systems right now, similar to what Motorola did 12 month ago, when it opted to streamline its development strategy, and focus on Android,” said Cunningham.
“That said, we expect that use of the Symbian platform will continue to be very strong and it will be the domain platform going forward,” said Cunningham. “Over next 12 months, we expect Nokia will use Symbian for its mass market products, but its more high end products are likely to use Maemo.”
“Symbian moving to open source may drive more innovation in the platform and it could encourage more people to contribute,” he added. “I guess that Symbian is hoping it will increase mind share among application developers, and make it more fashionable to develop applications for it.”
“The popularity of applications is all down to the ability to provide end users with the capability to customise the handset they have, either via integrating different apps into the UI (user interface) layer, or Apple’s approach, where apps are directly downloaded onto the device,” said Cunningham. “End users are far more aware of applications nowadays, compared to 12 months ago, and that awareness is mostly thanks to Apple with its App Store and iPhone.”
