Finland’s Nokia is still the largest mobile handset manufacturer in the world, but its influence in the high-end (and high-profit) smartphone market is increasingly falling short of competitors like RIM and Apple, in part because Nokia can’t seem to capitalize on features and capabilities consumers want in a smartphone. But Nokia is determined to forge ahead in the smartphone marketplace—and the company is placing its best on the Linux-based Maemo mobile OS, rather than the tried-and-true Symbian OS that has powered most of the company’s devices for years. At a gathering in London, Nokia marketing executives told Maeomo developers that Nokia plans to drop Symbian from its high-end N-series Internet-capable mobile devices by 2012.
Tag Archive: Symbian
HP, MySpace, and Qualcomm Sign with Symbian
Just ahead of the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Symbian Foundation has announced a slate of new partners signing on to support the Symbian mobile operating system…and the new announcements, at least temporarily, give Symbian a bigger slate of supporters in the mobile arena than Google’s Android platform. Among the new Symbian Foundation members include technology heavyweights like Hewlett Packard and Qualcomm, social networking giant MySpace, memory and PMP developer SanDisk, and financial giant Bank of America. Also on board: Atelier, Gemalto, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, Nanoradio, Omron Software, SESCA, SiRF Technology, and VirtualLogix.
AT&T to Adopt Symbian Exclusively?
It looks as if Symbian’s 49.8 percent stranglehold on the smartphone operating system market might be about to get even stronger, with rumors indicating that AT&T might be considering Symbian for all future AT&T-branded phones. AT&T’s director of next-generation services, Roger Smith, hinted at the choice at a Symbian event in San Francisco on Thursday.
According to Macworld, AT&T foresees smartphones becoming a much larger part of its business in the future, and wants to choose a single operating system to run across all AT&T-branded smartphones. The effort would not affect the iPhone, since AT&T sees it at as a distinct product that leverages its network, not a true AT&T product.
Nokia Completes Symbian Ltd. Acquisition
Nokia has completed its takeover of Symbian Limited, the company that creates and licenses the Symbian mobile operating system used in a broad swath of Nokia phones and devices, as well as mobile devices from LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and others.
The takeover, announced like June, is part of a move to set up Symbian as a royalty-free platform through the Symbian Foundation—in order to set the operating system free (and, hopefully, thereby encourage its use by a broader range of developers), Nokia had to buy up shares of Symbian Limited that it didn’t already own. At the time the deal was announced, Nokia owned about 48 percent of the company; it has since acquired over 99.9 percent of the outstanding shares, satisfying the terms of the takeover deal.
Nine New Members For Symbian Foundation
For an organization that’s barely two weeks old, the Symbian Foundation is flourishing. The Nokia-led group, which was formed to help develop and open-source Symbian over the next two years, has just added nine more members to its original 10, and claim that there’s interest from more than 150 other companies.
The original group – Nokia, Symbian, Motorola, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone – came together with the intent to develop and open-source Symbian, and also bring other, Symbian-derived platforms into the OS, according to ZDNet.
Nokia to Buy Symbian, Free Platform
Finland’s Nokia—still the world’s largest maker of mobile handsets—announced today it plans to acquire remaining outstanding shares of UK-based Symbian for €264 million (about $410 million). But the move isn’t intended to bring the Symbian operating system, which Nokia uses in its smartphones, fully in-house and give the mobile giant even greater control. Instead, Nokia plans to set Symbian up as a royalty-free platform, via the new Symbian Foundation, so other manufacturers and developers can use in their mobile devices. Industry watchers are viewing the move as a savvy response to Google’s open source Android platform and the LiMo Foundation’s efforts to build a Linux-based mobile platform…and, of course, to make Symbian more competitive with Windows Mobile counter mobile developers’ eagerness to build for the Apple iPhone.
Nokia, Symbian Dominate SmartPhone Market
“Nokia and Symbian now dominate the worldwide smartphone market although palmOne is holding its own in the U.S., according to a worldwide market study released Tuesday by U.K. research firm Canalys.
Overall, sales of smartphones and PDA/phone hybrids nearly doubled in the last year, the study found. In the first quarter of 2005, Nokia shipped 50 percent of all smartphones worldwide and Symbian was at the core of 61.4 percent of all smartphones. That’s not surprising since Nokia uses the Symbian platform for its smartphones. “
Symbian Captures 88% Market Share
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/) has announced the addition of Symbian Leads Pack of Advanced Mobile OSVendors, But It’s A Long Way to the Finish Line to their offering.
Wireless voice and data applications will continue to multiply and fragment across regions, networks and devices. No single wireless device type will emerge as the preferred platform for delivering advanced voice, data, and entertainment services over GPRS/EDGE, CDMA2000 1x EV/EV-DX, or WCDMA networks. Forward-thinking mobile software and hardware vendors are positioning their solutions to enable the implementation of applications across a broad range of end-user terminals with standardized, modular hardware and software architectures.
New Worm Targets Smart Phones
The worm program, dubbed Cabir by Russian antivirus company Kaspersky, apparently uses the Bluetooth short-range wireless feature of smart phones that run the Symbian operating system to detect other Symbian phones, and then transfers itself to the new host as a package file. While able to replicate the spread of the virus in research settings, antivirus companies have not found any evidence that the program is infecting smart phones outside of those limited test cases.
Read the rest of the story at CNET News.com.
Symbian Leads Smart-Phone Market
Symbian OS, co-owned by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and some other mobile phone vendor, is unlikely to be threatened by competiting OS such as Linux, Windows or Palm OS.
Cell-phone makers have backed Symbian so far in part to avoid leading their industry down the path of the PC business, where hardware is commoditized and software runs the show
