Published on Christmas Eve by Symbian Foundation Executive Director Lee Williams, there's an interesting article here detailing his thoughts on Symbian's role in the industry in 2010 and beyond. I've also quoted a few paragraphs below, with comment.
Read on in the full article.
So, Symbian is aiming at a low end smartphones, eh? Since they managed to loose and/or alienate many of the high end users, that actually makes sense... I have no doubts that there are some untapped markets out there in Cina's rural areas, I just hope that they will make also European versions... 😊
BTW, Symbian, for those farmers, you better improve/simplify GUI quick...
Payaxy,
I don't think you're understanding what's being said at all - I'm not sure if Steve is either. The term 'smartphone' has nothing to do with price. In fact if you look at the titles for some of the charts that Gartner and Canalys do you'll see the term 'Open mobile OS' is used. A smartphone is any device that carries an Open mobile OS (note, NOT Open Source, OPEN. Two completely different things). It has nothing to do with price. The price stated would probably be the lowest end and Symbian devices could well stay up in the high end as well. Look at some of the technical enhancements being made to Symbian - NGA, which depends on a graphics chip to function. SMP, that is multicore support. Do these sound like features of an exclusively 'cheap' OS? You must also have had your head in the sand because it's a well known fact that the Symbian UI is being massively overhauled over the course of this year.
Payaxy, so you are implying farmers are not smart and intelligent?
My take away was regarding the smartphone for the masses ... that speaks to emerging markets and mid-tier solutions. Price is important there and while it's great to see Nokia extending to those markets it says nothing about their effective concession on the high end.:con?
The problems with the high end are that it's insanely competitive at the moment and that it involves (naturally) large devices with large price tags. Neither of which appeal to most normob buyers.
I don't Symbian or Nokia are "conceding" the high end, they'll each have some representation there, but they're correctly identifying a growth opportunity in the hundreds of millions of feature phone buyers who are now upgrading to 'smartphones', i.e. devices that can 'do more'.
I've played a lot with the sub �100 touchscreen phones (on behalf of my daughter) and, while they've made strides, if such a buyer could get a decent camera and GPS for another �30, along with a smartphone OS that lets them install all kinds of cool extras, then I think that idea would do very well.
slitchfield wrote:The problems with the high end are that it's insanely competitive at the moment and that it involves (naturally) large devices with large price tags.
What's with the obsession with 3rd party apps and their developers nowadays?
rvirga wrote:And the problem with the sub $150 market is that people who spend that little on a phone don't usually spend money on software or accessories.
Are you saying that the people who buy the cheaper smartphones (the schoolkids) don't spend money on apps ?
LOL.
And these same kids are the high end users of the future.
slitchfield wrote:The problems with the high end are that it's insanely competitive at the moment and that it involves (naturally) large devices with large price tags. Neither of which appeal to most normob buyers.I've played a lot with the sub �100 touchscreen phones (on behalf of my daughter) and, while they've made strides, if such a buyer could get a decent camera and GPS for another �30, along with a smartphone OS that lets them install all kinds of cool extras, then I think that idea would do very well.
That will be the 5800 then.
And the 5530 is under �100 (no GPS) and absolutely destroys its Samsung and LG competitors.
Notice the quality of the discussion in the follow up comments there too (with the notable exception of the contributions of viipottaja)
Payaxy (or 'unregistered'😉, hope you enjoy your meals today, chances are good some dumb farmer made it possible. Trust me, farmers are actually generally pretty smart and resourceful guys. No, they don't always have the latest tech, but 9 times out of 10 it's because they are smart enough to know they don't need it, which can't be said for us early adopters 😊
viipottaja wrote:What's with the obsession with 3rd party apps and their developers nowadays?
Wasn't the variety of 3rd party applications one of the strengths of S60 that was lauded back in the day?
Don't tell me that now that Apple, Google, and RIM have shown how a 3rd party marketplace should be handled you think we should just ignore the segment?
rvirga wrote:And the problem with the sub $150 market is that people who spend that little on a phone don't usually spend money on software or accessories. Focusing on this segment kills 3rd party commercial development for Symbian. Asking developers of free software to pay to have their app signed kills free development too, and this explains why, although it's one of the oldest smartphone OS in the business, there are so few apps for Symbian compared to newcomers like the iPhone and Android. That Symbian users don't buy or download as many 3rd party apps is something you became aware yourself when you run your "name 3 apps you can't live without" poll.
The big elephant in the room is that low-end symbian phones are prevalently used as featurephones, that is, with just the apps they come with. Nokia putting Symbian rather than S40 on them serves no purpose other than artificially pumping their smartphone marketshare numbers. A stupid marketing game that, starting this year, Samsung will play as well. They've given a name ("Bada"😉 to their old featurephone OS, and opened its API (although probably nobody will develop for it), so that soon every sale of low-end junk like the Star or the Corby will count as a "smartphone" sale. When Nokia and Samsung are manipulating smartphone sales data numbers to the point they become irrelevant, all that matters to me is marketshare in the high-end segment. Because that, and only that, tells me how healthy is a platform's ecosystem.
I agree. I have no qualms about Symbian targeting the lower end market, I think its great. They are simply untouchable there. Believe me over here in Malaysia, these lower end smartphones have made a lot of people realize what a smartphone is and what it can do (the 5800 is HUGE here). These people (farmers, taxi drivers, factory workers, etc) are not as dumb as you might think Papaxy. I do however hope they remain a major player at the high-end segment though. Symbian (Nokia that is) is really in need of a respectable and competitive flagship. Bring back the days of the N95 + 6120c.
rvirga wrote:And the problem with the sub $150 market is that people who spend that little on a phone don't usually spend money on software or accessories. Focusing on this segment kills 3rd party commercial development for Symbian. Asking developers of free software to pay to have their app signed kills free development too, and this explains why, although it's one of the oldest smartphone OS in the business, there are so few apps for Symbian compared to newcomers like the iPhone and Android. That Symbian users don't buy or download as many 3rd party apps is something you became aware yourself when you run your "name 3 apps you can't live without" poll.
The "non-problem" could be that a lot of these apps will be iBeer and iFart-like, but there will also be a lot of games, and also a couple of utilities.
Third-party development on Symbian took a lot of hits before the iPhone came about, including the binary compatibility break with Symbian 9.1, Nokia Mosh distributing cracked Symbian software, UIQ 3 appearing one year late and going nowhere and Handango going to take 70% of the sales price. Pushing S60 down has the advantage of creating a lot of potential customers, but most of them won't be in the market for traditional PDA/smartphone software.