Nokia buying Symbian looks like just the stepping stone to this, with Nokia then sharing the technology on a royalty free and open source basis to allcomers. The detail: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO have announced their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create one open mobile software platform. Partnering together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. More below.
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I think this is very welcome. For starters it will lower the barriers to entry for newcomers in the smartphone and PDA-phone arena, who previously have been veering towards Linux and to a lesser degree WM.
It will be interesting to watch how this will work together with Symbian's comparatively rigid security model.
The merging of UIs is also welcome. From once having been UIs intended for specific form-factors and user input models (a la Crystal, Pearl and Quartz) they are now more or less the same, spreading over landscape, touch, keyboard etc within the same framework. It doesn't make sense to have different UIs anymore. Perhaps it actually never really made sense.
This will finally give us one Symbian UI and reduce all the complexities of multiple versions of UI & Symbian. But is this too late? I suppore it depends on what happens to S60 and UIQ3 in the next 12 months before we see the 'new' unified UI.
So I guess this will be Symbian v10 then, a good number to mark a new unified era....
...with Google's Android and Apple on their tail and don't event talk about Microsoft's Windows Mobile and RIM's Blackberry. Who needs different flavors of an Ice cream when all people want is Vanilla !!
Here's the link on Symbian's website : http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2008/pr200810018.html
I think what we're ultimately going to see is the death of UIQ and MOAP as we know them and a resurgance of interest and development in S60 (hopefully with the "others" insisting Nokia fix some of the blatent usability bugs). Why will S60 triumph over the others? It has the largest installed user base and the largest number of 3rd party apps.
martinharnevie: "So I guess this will be Symbian v10 then, a good number to mark a new unified era...."
Or Symbian X? Hehe.
PekkaR wrote:Or Symbian X? Hehe.
Noooooooo..... heaven forbid!
This move is little late. But better late than never.
Is a multiuser OS. Or at least a guest account/mode for mij mobile. So kids kan play safely games on it without ruining my private info.
This is all really about tackling the US market. Look at how many US companies are involved in lauchinng the foundation.
It's not obvious to the average user because it's buried deep in Symbian, but developers and phone makers know that Symbian OS has an ace up its sleeve. It has a minimal resource footprint compared to linux/unix based offerings and it uses a method for multi-tasking that uses less memory and less battery. Even a single CPU for the phone function and OS os possible. This means that manufacturers can build a phone for less money. If the OS is open too then the cost of licensing Symbian is gone and the phone is even cheaper, more profit for the manufacturers. More manufacturers interested. See the list making up Symbian Foundation.
Even if improved hardware makes OS efficiency less important, the Symbian is always going to be the most cost effective. S60 may be a bit dog-eared in places, but Symbian OS is unsurpassed in its field.
The merging of UIs is also welcome. From once having been UIs intended for specific form-factors and user input models (a la Crystal, Pearl and Quartz) they are now more or less the same
Absolutely.
The separate UIs made sense in the days when S60 phones looked and worked differently to UIQ phones, but we're about to see S60 phones which support touch and we've already seen UIQ phones which don't. The overlap is so great that it's just silly to have two separate interfaces doing the same job on the same OS.
Unifying them into one single platform will be better for manufacturers, better for developers and (most important of all) better for the actual users.
martinharnevie wrote:It will be interesting to watch how this will work together with Symbian's comparatively rigid security model.
I'm not sure what you mean here, Platform Security is pretty flexible.
The PlatSec model gives free access to many APIs, and groups other similar ones under a Capability. E.g. ReadUserData for APIs that read the user's personal info like contacts & calendar, WriteDeviceData for API's that can configure (or screw up) the device settings.
Application developers should only request the privileges they need to operate. And the owner can guess somewhat the risk of using a particular application by knowing what privileges it wants.
This is somewhat like the way functionality is protected on other OSes, requiring users to be issued with Privileges by an Admin in order to carry out actions, or override rules.
The manufacturer, perhaps in consultation with the phone company that will sell the device/variant, decides the policy for how each capability is granted.
ttfn
martinharnevie" wrote:
So I guess this will be Symbian v10 then, a good number to mark a new unified era....
in the 10th anniversary year of Symbian that might juts be a good starting version for the Foundation... it also looks a bit like v1.0 - finally out of " user (shareholder) acceptance testing"
http://tenyears.symbian.com/