Oh snap. Gartner is talking all kinds of mess about Symbian and its chances in the smartphone market where the Apple iPhone and Google Android seem to attract the most attention.
As you may know, Nokia bought Symbian in 2008 with the goal of spinning it into an independent organization that offers a free, open source smartphone operating system. The Symbian Foundation is in charge of making this happen and we’re finally seeing this venture bear fruits.
These things take time to create though, as we’re finally just seeing Symbian^3 on devices like the Nokia N8. “Distinguished” Gartner analyst (not a dig at him, that’s his title) Nick Jones has seen the latest version of Symbian and he wants that weak stuff out of his house.
Based on the early previews I’ve seen Symbian 3 looks to have polished a few of the rough edges, but doesn’t fix the problem. So if the weak UI is threatening Symbian’s very survival the Foundation ought to be seriously worried, right? Wrong. I just looked on the Foundation web site and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases.
What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn’t matter. For example: Audio policy packages for Symbian, WiFi direct, support for an “open cloud manifesto,” an accredited Symbian developer program for China, better multitasking, multiple personalized home screens, HDMI connection to external TVs, better web runtime support, better internal architecture and so on.
I’d have to pretty much agree with Jones, as the IntoMobile team has been severely disappointed with Symbian^3 and even Symbian^4 (which looks dated even though it doesn’t hit until next year!). You should see Stefan when he sees new Symbian videos, the dude’s downright crestfallen.
I wouldn’t quite count them out of the race yet, though. The Symbian Foundation is truly an open organization and the members and partners have a better chance of having a strong impact on the platform development than they do on Android.
Plus, for all its missteps, Nokia is still the world’s largest cell phone maker and that scale alone could help the open source Symbian.
[Via Gartner]