Mobile Info Planet

Symbian is the OS that arguably generates the least buzz these days (WM 6.5 certainly hasn't received rave reviews, but at least it gets *some* reviews). Ever since they decided to go open source under the Symbian Foundation very little, if anything, has materialized from a consumer's point of view.

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Lately there has even been quite a lot of talk about Symbian's demise as they are presumably failing to innovate and falling behind the competition. To some extent I agree with that critique: the last innovating Symbian device was, in my opinion, the first N95 which was released in the spring of 2007 (though I think the Samsung HD i8910 probably deserves a better rep than it has). But I think that the problems Symbian faces currently mainly stem from three things.

• Going from a commercial company to an open source one of the size/importance of Symbian takes a huge amount of time and resources, and as we all know both time and resources are finite, meaning that the energy that could have been invested in R&D and innovation is spent on administration and reorganization.
  
  
• "Symbian", by and large, is equivalent to "Nokia". So if Nokia fails to put out interesting devices it leaves the impression that it is Symbian that is not innovating.
  
  
• Just as "Symbian = Nokia", to the majority of consumers it is also probably true that "Symbian = S60", which is difficult to argue against as a perception. The problem here is that S60 is undoubtedly looks dated compared to the rest of the platforms (excluding BlackBerry OS of course, but that is material for another post...), and so many people automatically infer that it is Symbian that is getting old.
  
  

However, each of these three things will likely change.

• Once Symbian is done with the "paperwork" of going open source they can completely turn their attention to the OS itself.
  
  
• As a free and open platform available for everyone, we will see more devices from companies other than Nokia.
  
  
• S60 will be replaced by Qt (which should happen in 2011 according to the published roadmaps), so the "dated" perception of Symbian will eventually change as they replace the UI.
  

Given this, I expect great things from Symbian in the future. I hope to see great things from them. Because even though Symbian certainly has its flaws I really do think it is a cracking OS: it is rock solid, extremely power efficient and with arguably the best multitasking capabilities of all platforms (though it remains to be seen how well Maemo performs). As such, I think Symbian deserves a better fate than only to be used on mid- and low-end phones, as Nokia has declared regarding their plans for the OS.

I really hope the platform gets the opportunity to reach its full potential under the Symbian Foundation.