If you’re still trying to figure out what this new, open-source Symbian will be all about, check out The Symbian Foundation unwrapped” by Rafe Blandford over at All About Symbian. Rafe knows as much about Symbian as anybody, and has posted the definitive piece on this big development.

As Russell mentioned earlier, some big news from Symbian today. Nokia’s buying the rest of Symbian that it doesn’t already own, and will then create the Symbian Foundation, in collaboration with a number of other companies, and make Symbian royalty-free and open-source.

This is, as they say, A Big Deal.

First, the multiple UIs and platforms on top of the Symbian OS — S60, UIQ and MOAP — are disappearing and will be integrated into a single, unified platform with a common UI framework (with S60 at the core). That’s a big advancement in itself.

Second, Symbian will be available royalty-free. Anybody that wants to use it in handsets, or have access to the complete code, will just have to join the Symbian Foundation for $1500 a year. That essentially erases Android’s price advantage, and could lead to a raft of Symbian-based devices for the mid- and low-tier from OEM vendors.

Third, this should significantly enhance the ability of the Symbian platform to support custom UIs. As I’ve written before, this will be a key area of competition for mobile OSes, and the ability for manufacturers to create their own UI enhancements will be crucial. See my comment on that earlier post for a bit of I told you so :): “Perhaps it’s something that can change in future — making it easier for people to create custom UIs on top of Symbian, rather than having to license one of the existing ones.” Add in the ability for operators to further customize the UI of said devices (witness AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone as initial supporters of the Symbian foundation), and there could be an even bigger push here. And maybe we will see that Facebook mobile UI, too…

As I said, this is a big, big deal. The Symbian OS has essentially become free, and this is a smart move on Nokia’s part as it stands to gain significantly from the further spread of Symbian and S60. It’s a significant answer to Android, and a good response to the iPhone as it should allow for a lot of innovation in the UI. What do you think?

For some more reading, AllAboutSymbian will, as you’d expect, stay on top of the story, while View From The Coalface has a good take on things, and Andrew Orlowski at El Reg weighs in with Symbian’s death knell.

I’ll have some more on the Symbian news in a bit, but thought I’d get this up first. Russell’s apparently a bit of a mobile history buff, and something he’s mentioned before is Hutchison’s Rabbit phone system, which it launched in May 1992… and shut down in December 1993. Rabbit was a great big cordless phone system. Users carried a Rabbit handset around, and when they were within 100m of a Rabbit transmitter, they could make calls. Incoming calls simply weren’t offered — so it’s hard not to see the limited attraction of this sort of service.

Fast forward to 2008, and the Rabbit history lesson is still useful, what with the launch of mobile VoIP services that work only over Wi-Fi, or even with services calling themselves “mobile” phone networks. Check out UK01, which bills itself as “the UK’s 6th mobile phone network.” The company behind UK01 won one of the low-power GSM licenses offered by Ofcom last year, so they’re rolling out their picocells on “hundreds of payphone kiosks”. Interesting, right?

Give a spotter’s badge to Patrick at SMS Text News, who noticed an important detail on the site’s instructions page: “When you leave the UK01 location simply change SIM cards.” Meaning put the SIM from your real operator back into your phone. UK01 does give you a number so people can call you, but that call will only go through if you’re in range of one of their picocells (the site doesn’t give any indication where they are, by the way) and have the SIM in. Otherwise, it’s voicemail.

Sound familiar?

(Also, yes, I did notice that UK01’s site is at http://uk01.mobi, and it doesn’t seem to serve up mobile content if you visit it from a handset browser, and it of course fails the ready.mobi test. And yes, I thought that thing was supposed to be against the rules of .mobi, as it sort of undermines the whole position that when people see a .mobi site, they know it’s for their mobile phone, and so on…)

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s announcement from Google that the launch of Android would be delayed from the second quarter to the fourth, is a potentially huge one from Symbian that could make Android completely irrelevant when devices eventually do start to ship.

It’s too early to see exactly how the Symbian news will play out. But the bottom line is that Nokia are buying all their partners out (including Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens), while simultaneously establishing the Symbian Foundation, an open source, royalty-free platform in conjunction with industry giants, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

According to AdMob Metrics, Symbian already has a 55% share in the market globally [added to clarify: of the Smartphone sector] and considerably higher in some markets. These stats are skewed towards mobile web users obviously, but I don’t think that’s misrepresenting anything in this case. But trying to play catchup in a market where Google is still very much a novice, is going to be very hard.

Of course, even if Android doesn’t work at all for Google, they don’t really care in the wider scheme of things, provided that more and more people come to the mobile web via an Android-like experience, Google will still benefit by being able to serve up ads. At least that’s the theory posited in a new Wired article today, for which Chetan Sharma (buy his book) was interviewed.

And if they don’t? Not much downside. If the only thing Android achieves — as Page knew before Rubin walked into Google three years ago — is getting more people to spend more time online, then Google still profits. More users mean more people viewing pages with Google ads. If they’re doing that from an Android phone, great. If not, but they’re on a phone made more Web-friendly thanks to competitive pressure from Google, that’s also fine. “I hope it’s Android,” Page says. But either way, Google wins.

Of course, it’s not quite as black and white as that. Android doesn’t really need to apply this type of pressure anymore - now we have the iPhone. Android doesn’t need to provide an open source alternative - we have Symbian and Linux. And there’s also an implicit assumption that all these ads in the new mobile world will be Google’s.

We’ll see, I guess.

Time has a great photo essay on the history of the mobile phone, which is worth checking out.

This one shows Martin Cooper, widely regarded as the Father of the Mobile. The photo was taken back in 1983, although the mobile looks much smaller and sleeker than I remember them being in those days.

It’s not a new idea though as the first working prototype was deployed in 1922 in Chicago, as a radio telephone used by the police. I had no idea that Sting was that old.

Story via Alfie’s Blog, Father of the pioneering Moblog UK.

I get a lot of thinking done in the shower. I’ll leave it at that so as not to draw any unwanted mental images, but this morning, I was washing what little hair I’ve got left and had a thought about Facebook. Since my trip to San Diego for the BREW conference (more thoughts on that are forthcoming in another post), I’ve been thinking more and more about widgets and runtimes and such. But my thought this morning: what happens if/when Facebook takes its platform and apps mobile?

Obviously there are plenty of Facebook apps that won’t run on mobile phones, I get that. But check out the post by Dean Bubley I referenced earlier, about Facebook v handset apps. What if Facebook creates some sort of layer or runtime that would let developers offer mobile apps, or mobile versions of their apps, as it’s done with its web platform? (Mobile Scrabulous anyone? :D)

It would face the same hurdles as all the other companies targeting this space with their own widget platforms or web runtimes, but its popularity and reach gives it a tremendous advantage. The Facebook mobile site is already one of the most popular mobile web destinations — and with normobs, not just early adopters and hardcore geeks (and MH readers).

James Whatley wrote a post a few months back about Facebook as a mobile device UI. That might be a bit extreme, but I think we’re going down similar tracks that will see the likes of Facebook — internet giants that focus on social connections — making bigger moves into mobile beyond simple sites offering cut-down versions of their PC web sites.

Anyhow, that’s my shower thought for today. What do you think? An idea best left to sink down the drain, or one that deserves being worked up into a lather?

Our pal Rudy de Waele has been putting a lot of hard work into the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference on July 4 in Barcelona, and he dropped us a line to say they’ve finalized the agenda and speakers list. Tickets are selling fast, so if you’re interested, jump on them soon as the event will likely sell out. The list of speakers looks solid, and I already know of quite a few great people that are attending, so the networking and socializing will be top notch. Plus, a trip to Barcelona rarely disappoints!

I’ve seen several things worth reading over the last several days that I wanted to share…

24% of Apple iPhone users upgraded from a Motorola RAZR - SMS Text News

24% — or, almost a quarter — of those surveyed who upgraded to an iPhone, did so from a stinky Motorola RAZR.

Now I don’t have exact stats — and I can’t be sure how representative the Rubicon Consulting study is. The important bit for me is the mind-blowing difference of experience that those RAZR users will have encountered.

That, or the iPhone’s the current iteration of the RAZR: a fashion piece before a mobile phone.

India Sells 10,000 Phone Per Hour in Q1 ‘08 - Cellular-News

Shipments in Q1 2008 stood at more than 22 million handsets, which amounts to around 10,000 mobile phones being shipped every hour during the quarter. In the same quarter a year ago (Q1 ’07), just under 18 million mobile phones were shipped.

Apps on smartphones = Geek. Apps on Facebook = Fun. Why? - Dean Bubley’s Disruptive Wireless

But another speaker made the very insightful point that many people who would recoil in horror at installing smartphone apps are entirely happy to stuff their FaceBook pages with all sorts of random plug-ins. It made me think a bit about what the differences are behind this divergent attitudes.

A couple of posts from Tom Hume on panels from the Mobile Web 2.0 show, one on platform capability and enablement, another on “Mobile Web 2.0: Two Tribes or One World?

MH pal James Whatley has been hard at work combining the talents of his employer, SpinVox with those of MTV and singer Kelly Rowland on StandByWhatYouSay.com, which gives people the chance to call in and anonymously voiceblog about various sexual health and relationship topics. Interesting stuff, well done Whatleydude.

And finally, I’d like to award +10 geek points to another MH pal, Martin Sauter, for his post about using the flatscreen TVs in hotel rooms as a second screen for his laptop. We salute you, sir! Though I must admit I was going to deduct 10 geek points for having a RAZR variant, but since it’s being used as an HSDPA modem, I’ll allow it

I just thought that I’d let you all know that it was announced last week that I’ve been made Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association. I think a lot of people missed the announcement as it followed hard on the heels of the one about Chairing EMEA.

For me personally, this is huge - and validation of sticking with the mobile marketing industry through the dark, grim years of the early part of this century when we all wondered if it was ever going to take off.

The MMA today comprises all the leading players in mobile marketing, with over 600 members in 40 countries, including the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch, digital giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, as well as many of the world’s more visionary agencies. So I really feel incredibly flattered that I’ve been elected to lead the whole thing.

What’s actually really interesting though, is that it’s quite honestly all down to blogging. This isn’t some kind of false humility, but a fact. If I hadn’t been a fairly well known blogger, I’d never have joined AdMob - or certainly not as the first employee in the world - because Omar, AdMob’s founder would never have heard of me. We met simply because some of the VCs he was talking to suggested we should get together, as they read my blog.

Then when it came to MMA Board elections, blogging gave me the edge over some very tough competition as people had heard of me and I’m convinced that you, our MobHappy readers helped spread the word in your organisations too.

So a heartfelt Thank You to all MobHappy readers - I really, really couldn’t have done it without you. I owe every single one of you a huge favour.

I hope that my short year as Chairman will be a pivotal one for the MMA and there’s already some exciting initiatives underway. But I’d like to be judged by action on this, so watch this space.

Finally, huge kudos to the Board members and previous Chairmen before me (no women, sadly) and of course, the dedicated permanent staff at the MMA. It makes my job so much easier with this huge momentum.

I’ve been saying for a while now that MMS is slowly starting to happen, 8 long years after its launch and 7 years after the book wot I wrote and that no one bought. So it’s great to see a mega-brand getting stuck in and launching an idea that makes the most of MMS and mobile, while mixing in personalisation and user-generated-content memes. What more could we want?

Produced by my pals at AKQA, the idea is that you snap a photo containing a couple of colours that inspire or attract you. You then MMS the photo to Nike, who use the colourways to produce a personalised pair of classic 1985 Dunk high-top basketball sneakers.

You can’t get much cooler than that.

Watch the video