[General] Fwd: Symbian Goes Open Source - Courtesy of Nokia

[Burhan Khalid]

Majed B. wrote:
> Honestly, I don't see this as a big threat. Symbian has been round for
> a long time (10 years?) and it wasn't as good as it should have nor as
> expected.
> 
> With Android, the framework is unified, so one program should work on
> all devices, unless it uses hardware specific to a certain device
> (e.g., accelerometer), which is not the case for Symbian, where
> developers had to write the same program for multiple platforms (S60,
> S80).

By the way, there is only one platform -- its called Symbian. The 
S60/S80/UIQ are GUI built on top of Symbian (the Operating System). You 
can think of it as Symbian = Linux, S60 = Gnome, UIQ = KDE.

What is so bad about Symbian? I see a lot of people complaining about 
it, but no one can tell me in concrete terms that these are the problems 
I have with *Symbian* -- and not with S60/S80/UIQ.

> Symbian would have had a shot, maybe, if it was open-source 5 years
> back. Enough time for the community to gather and fix this complicated
> OS. I think Nokia did its stunt in an effort to stay on the top of the
> mobile industry, since it's the main user of Symbian, as others are
> shifting to Linux (e.g., Motorola).

Again -- not sure where you get your numbers from. Symbian is the most 
popular mobile operating system by a very large margin. Nokia is not the 
only user of Symbian. SE and Motorola both use Symbian, so does Samsung.

> Android seem to be having some delays over hardware issues from device
> manufacturers, so enthusiasm is cooling down for now, but Symbian is
> dying (in my opinion) much faster than Android's cool-down.

I doubt this very much. What makes you think Symbian is dead? The 
biggest threat to a mobile OS is the device, and since Android doesn't 
have one yet -- mainly because the platform is not finalized yet, I 
think its very premature to declare Symbian dead -- lest you sound like 
a fanboy.

> I'm guessing within 3 years, Symbian will be dead, and Nokia will have
> some really tough time in sales, unless some miracle happens!

Wow. Seriously? The largest mobile phone developer in the world ... with 
the largest market share, will be dead in 3 years, based on the threat 
from a operating system that hasn't been finalized, nor has it been in 
the market?

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