In All About Symbian Insight 131, we start with new of a firmware update for the 5800 and 5230, which leads to a discussion on firmware change logs. Ewan talks about his recent Android experience, with the ZTE Racer (Rafe chips in with details of the Vodafone 845), which leads to a general discussion of Android in the low end. In the final part of the podcast David continues his C6 briefing, with details of the phone's multimedia capabilities. You can listen to AAS Insight 131 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
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On the "Android tech will get cheaper and can therefore compete with Symbian better in the lower end". It is true. However, besides what Rafe mentions on consumer expectations, what will also happen is:
Symbian tech will ALSO get cheaper; so, when Android tech is cheap enough, Symbian has already also moved on to next gen tech - i.e. it should be a step ahead again, at least for some time to come.
viipottaja - yes that's a good point that I should have mentioned. Things don't remain still. Android's need to remain competitive at the high end may act as a break on the low end (the opposite happen with Symbian). This is one of the reasons I think the Symbian / MeeGo split is a shrewd move on Nokia's part.
It's also worth pointing out that Nokia will, for the foreseeable future, have better economies of scale than any other manufacturer (Samsung will be close I would imagine).
Economies of scale can be read at two levels with open phones. One at the broad platform level, but on at the manufacturer level. Android will sell a lot of phones, but wont be able to match the phones per company ratio.
Sorry for being picky but it is Tesco, not Tesco's
Yes I was gonna say that too about Symbian, by the time Moores law applys to Android, Symbian^4 and Symbian^5 will be out. The UI will be fixed and add that to the much more mature OS and the fact that Gingerbread is rumoured to be even more resource intensive.
Will Android 2.2 get further updates after gingerbread, I doubt it to be honest.
It is a difficult one to foresee, but it is clear Symbian is sitting fairly pretty in the immediate future.
Curious, but when the N8 and S^3 surfaces, will Nokia continue to 'democratise' smartphone ownership using the S60 3rd and 5th edition, or will it use S^3 (or a variant thereof) to meet the mid/low end Android devices?
Is S^3 purely a touchscreen based OS or could it be employed on the non touch Qwerty handsets that are the preserve of S60 3rd edition right now?
It was interesting to listen to Ewan's coverage of the popularity of 5th edition apps in the Ovi Store compared to 3rd edition apps and wondered how this would influence the choice of Symbian flavours in the various areas of the market Nokia competes in?
I'm not sure I agree with Ewan picking on the fact you have to download an app for Android to kill the data session being a major bug bear. Almost everyone will have to google to find out how to do it on Symbian as well, which is almost as bad. This situation highlights inadequacies in both OS's. One for a lack of a feature, and the other for a poor UI.