The Good and the Bad of Open Source Symbian

February 4, 2010 By Dena Cassella

Will the new open Symbian OS be good or not so good for the mobile market?

Open source anything is worthy of celebration, but we’re not sure whether the newly opened Symbian mobile operating system is in need of a party or some further investigating. There are a lot of things good and bad that will come with a new transition like this. We give some reasons for why an open source code could be good, or bad, for Symbian and the mobile market.

Good

Effortless Reinvention. Even though Symbian is the leading smartphone operating system in the world, it is kind of old news and Nokia knew that—hence moving it to open source. Now that it is open source the waning platform will be maintained and further developed without any effort or investment from Nokia.

Options. After Google demonstrated how effective an open source mobile operating system can be—thanks Android—more people will be willing to dive into Symbian. This will provide more options for users, developers and smartphone vendors who will customize and format new branches of this mobile OS.

Bigger is Better. The sheer number of Symbian users is what will attract top notch developers and really get things rolling with this whole open source thing. This will definitely help forge relationships with better developers, perhaps even ones who have tried to hook up with Apple and Google.

No Slippery Slope. People love to pull slippery slope arguments out for situations just like this one, claiming that now that Symbian is going open source everyone will. Wrong. That is highly unlikely. You think closed off companies like Apple or Research in Motion are going let just anyone manage their mobile operating systems? We don’t think so—those guys are excelling in the mobile market all on their own.

Not So Good

Still Old OS. So there may be some reinventing going on, but when it really comes down to it, Symbian is still on its death bed. Nokia just recharged its heart with some open source defibrillaters, but unfortunately that could not be enough to get it to beat the way it used to.

Forkage. There could be too many creative lines crossing and confusion may ensue if too many devs get their hands on the Symbian OS. Different developers may take the code in different directions, making it difficult to know which Symbian will work with which Symbian smartphones.

Where Nokia Stands. The aging operating system has been widely associated with Nokia, and that fact itself may deter other smartphone vendors from pouncing on this open source opportunity. Essentially Nokia would be handing out Symbian to its competitors. Will smartphone vendors view Symbian as being a product of Nokia or just a neighboring system?

Showing 2 comments

DRM at 3:31am 5th February 2010 Totally agree. This is a commercial war. Some kind of America against the rest of the world.
Pieter Hugo at 9:35pm 4th February 2010 It amazes me how the media latches onto 'common knowledge' and then packages it as gospel. Take the idea that symbian is an 'old OD'. This is just patently untrue. Symbian is one of the few OSes that was built from the ground up in this century (and specifically for low powered mobile devices, which is why my nokia E71 gets days of battery life as opposed to half a day on my N900) Most other 'modern' operating systems have their roots firmly in the previous century's PC operating systems. (Linux, OSx, Windows)

Where this falacy comes from is probably that Symbian was the first serious OS to be developed for phones - in a time where keyboards ruled the roost. Now we have touch screens interfaces pasted over old code, and everyone is thinking 'new OS' - not true. A valid criticism that can be levelled at Symbian is its non-intuitiveness. Sure - if you have such a full featured powerhouse with so many features it the configuration is bound to be a bit challenging (You should see me struggle to get bluetooth properly configured on Vista!) The newer OSes have stripped out large swathes of functionality and simplified the experience for the non-technical user (more or less a good thing - don't get me wrong) but the argument that Symbian is old does not hold water.