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.
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“this should significantly enhance the ability of the Symbian platform to support custom UIs”
True, but the core to success for an application platform is API and behavior consistency across devices. That’s what’s made Windows such a colossal success on the desktop.
Also, if devices lack certain features it must be very simple to determine so. This doesn’t apply to just the UI. Think e.g. phones with or without GPS.
So called “smartphone/open” OS’s are still used in few phones, so if Symbian is to be THE phone platform, Nokia needs to act police to keep the platform consistent.
Cheers
Anders
[...] which they can be customized with user interfaces. I think this is part of what’s behind the recent Symbian move, for instance. But what will also be key will be those OSes and UIs that give the best mobile [...]
Andres you’re kidding right? success of Windows was because of behaviour consistency? well… ya when you consider that Windows was pretty much the *only* OS on PC for general users, yes then you can call that consistency. But thats not the case for mobile phones, very different platform, and a very different market. Here Symbian very much dominates the market and thats already a good start. And considering the factors Carlos has mentioned above, its only going to get better! for developers and consumers both!
Bilal
http://buzzzword.blogspot.com/