Where are the industrial Symbian smartphones?
By Dusan Belic on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 2:01 AM PST In Symbian
Simon Judge of Mobile Phone Development wrote an interesting post on the subject. If we turn our heads off of the SysOpen Digia’s 48″ tall Symbian S60 mobile phone, no Symbian OS licensee makes phones for industrial usage, such as logistics. At the last year’s Symbian Smartphone Show, Palm (NSDQ: PALM) OS units were used for tracking people.
In 2006, maker of the rugged industrial phones Psion Teklogix earned a total of £190 million. Other rugged phone manufacturer Symbol Technologies had an annual revenue of 1.7 Billion USD, and was acquired by Motorola (NYSE: MOT) last year. One wonders why Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) don’t go for this market. It may be a niche, but other than that – Nokia shoots for all other markets.
Is it the question of software? Developing for the other platforms is certainly easier, but Nokia certainly has a capacity to develop its own solutions. On the other hand, maybe Motorola with its recent return to the UIQ world will push some industrial Symbian devices. Or it’s easier to go with the other platforms? What do you think?
Well Psion Tekloigx would make a symbian Rugged PDA like the workabout MX which runs EPOC, a precurser to the Symbian OS, if the market wanted one but all of the research says that the IT “Gurus” that buy the rugged devices want Windows Mobile 6 or Windows CE 5 (soon to be 6) because they don’t want to learn how to program efficiantly!
We would love to use the old operating system again because it would make our devices last at leaset 3x as long…
Oh Well, Change the minds of the IT buyers / app writers and then we will
We started in 1986 with our GEODOS software on Psion OrganizerII In 1995 we ported GEODOS to Psion Workabout range. Big success. In 2000 we were ready on the next platform Psion NetPad and NetBook. Why did Psion Teklogix destroy it all by convert to Microsoft. I agree “Where are the industrial smartphones”. Perhaps NAVTEQ (Garmin?) will help Nokia to find the market again. We have sold several thousands of Epoc based PDA:s in the industrial market. Psion NetPad was perfect with Epoc, but useless with Windows CE.