Supporters of Symbian have responded quickly to a Gartner analyst who has said the mobile operating system is doomed without a new user interface.
“I think the Symbian foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the Android iceberg ahead,” said Gartner vice president Nick Jones in a blog post last week.
Jones acknowledged that the open source Symbian operating system has a big enough market share to “remain the dominant platform for a few years more”, but said that the user experience couldn’t match iPhone or Android.
Symbian supporters have responded that the new Symbian user interface is on track and will improve rapidly, thanks to the integration of the Qt cross-platform toolkit – but others have pointed out that the OS’s relation with Nokia may lie at the door of the problem.
Symbian 4 is a “bet the platform” project
Symbian is losing market share at an accelerating rate, according to Gartner research, said Jones, drawing conclusions which he labels as his personal viewpoint, not an official Gartner statement.
“The main reason Symbian is losing share is the user experience which isn’t competitive with Apple or Android,” he said. “Based on the early previews I’ve seen Symbian 3 looks to have polished a few of the rough edges, but doesn’t fix the problem.” The new UI is not due to arrive till 2011, which is too late, said Jones.
Given an “existential threat” to Symbian, the Symbian Foundation is putting “too much effort on stuff that really doesn’t matter,” said Jones, listing audio policy packages, “Wi-Fi direct”, support for an “open cloud manifesto”, an accredited Symbian developer program for China, better multitasking, multiple personalised home screens, HDMI connection to external TVs, and other features.
“Forget elegant architecture, forget better multitasking, forget Chinese developers, forget release schedules that don’t deliver S4 devices with a new user experience until 2011,” said Jones. “None of these matter. People will never use the features if they don’t buy the phone.”
Any developer who isn’t working on something directly related to the new user interface is “wasting their time,” said Jones, making the new UI a “bet the platform” project: “For any organisation to be in a situation where its survival depends on one project is very dangerous, especially when their track record in the area isn’t outstanding.”
Symbian plans better UI
“I think you see the deck chairs and miss the course corrections that are constantly being made,” Sebastian Brannstrom, release manager at the Symbian Foundation, responded to Jones’ post. “Improving the user experience is absolutely the number 1 priority for Symbian at the moment.”
Symbian^3 includes a redesign of the graphics architecture and the Qt cross-platform framework, specifically to allow better UI development, said Brannstrom. In Symbian^4, the application interface layer will be replaced, and then, “I think we will see pretty rapid development of the UI in S^5 and S^6, as we get more familiar with the new design,” said Brannstrom. The Symbian^3 product developer kit is available
Symbian is the most capable platform and, as well as rearranging deck chairs, “there is plenty of work being done at the deck and in the machine room too”, added Brannstrom.
“Symbian may be pushing the envelope, but it’s pushing it in directions which don’t interest 95 percent of handset buyers,” responded Jones, pointing out the paradoxical fact that limited features get Apple a huge response, while extra features can limit the appeal.
Nokia and Symbian
Although the Symbian OS is now open source, it is still a “hostage to Nokia”, according to Jones, and it is Nokia which sets the timetable for the new UI – and is the source of 90 percent of the code in the Symbian OS, according to other comments.
“Nokia is developing the new UI for the Symbian platform and the somewhat tardy schedule is theirs,” commented Mark Wilcox, an engineer at Symbian. “Similarly the bulk of the other features you claim are unimportant are also coming from Nokia to their schedules.”
Despite effectively keeping control of Symbian, Nokia has an equivocal relationship with the OS, Nokia announced that it was replacing Symbian with Meego ( the Nokia/Intel joint Linux OS) on its N-series phones, even though the soon-to-be-released N8 smartphone is the first actual phone to run the new Symbian^3 version.
Of course, Nokis is still using Symbian on lower-end smartphones, and has suggested the OS may make a return to the N-series with Symbian^4.
Jones sugested that the Foundation should have some kind of “skunkworks” alternative UI in hand, in case the Nokia-backed Symbian^4 UI goes pear-shaped, however voices from within Symbian, added to his blog, seemed sceptical about that prospect. “The foundation simply doesn’t have the resources to do the whole thing,” said Wilcox, adding that there is an alternative in Japan, but pointed out that there would be little incentive for this, since if the Nokia version works out OK,” the alternative would be quickly killed to avoid the fragmentation which has plagued Symbian in the past.
With a good UI, Symbian could be a place for companies to run to who are scared of Google’s dominance, said Wilcox. If not, “Symbian will be a Nokia (& maybe Chinese & Japanese local markets) platform for the rest of its (limited) days.”
