We’ve got some good news for Symbian, and we’ve got some bad news. We already had Sony Ericsson abandoning the Symbian platform, but today Samsung joined them in leaving Symbian behind. The good news is that Nokia has released some figures on downloads from its Ovi Store, and it ain’t that bad, actually.
Let’s start with the bad news, so we can end this story on a happy note. The exodus from Symbian is continuing, as today Samsung has announced it will completely abandon the platform. By year’s end, it will close all of its Symbian forums and remove all of its Symbian-related content.
It makes sense. Samsung is currently betting on three platforms (Bada, Android, and Windows Phone 7), so having a fourth platform on board seems like a little bit overkill – especially taking into consideration that Symbian is simply lagging behind. Again, I would like to say that Bada deserves more attention than it gets. My brother has a Bada phone, and contrary to what I expected, it was pretty good stuff. If you get the chance to play with one, don’t hesitate.
As for the good news, Nokia released some figures about the number of downloads from its Ovi Store. They say the Ovi Store is serving up 2.3 million downloads per day, and more than 70 developers have passed the million downloads mark, with the absolute king being Offscreen, which saw its applications downloaded a good 45 million times.
“At Nokia, we believe that connecting people with great mobile experiences is at the heart of what Ovi is all about,” said Tero Ojanpera, executive vice president of Services at Nokia, “Today people discover Ovi through Maps, Music, Messaging, Store and Life Tools.”
Let’s hope that with the launch of Symbian^3, and the accompanying crop of top-notch (hardware-wise) devices from Nokia, Symbian manages to find a second wind. Sure, it’s still the top-seller in the world, but its market share is dropping faster than my jaw would if I ever ran into Fiona Apple. Or a unicorn.
Symbian^3 doesn’t look too shabby in my opinion. As a Finn myself I’ve got some automagic love for Nokia, although I’ve been wanting a WebOS phone for quite some time.
The N8 seems pretty fine, I’m loving the HDMI support. Their newly announced E7 looks pretty damn nice too. I’d rather see a phone running MeeGo though!
I wish the competition in Finland was nice enough that other companies would want to enter. Neither Blackberry/RIM nor Palm/HP phones are available here (unless brought in from abroad.)
Then you may like this:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/14/nokia-hires-peter-skillman-forme…
That’s good news, hopefully.
I’d like Nokia to come out with a few kick-ass Meego phones before I need a new one. My SE X10 Mini is pretty decent as it is, and there are plenty of cool things to Android, but I’d prefer not being so tied to Google. It does one thing better than Apple, in not having a cruddy POS software like iTunes in the middle of everything, but Google’s services are pretty much central to everything, still. And the presumed openness of the platform is, well, limited to how easily someone can hack the phone’s bootloader. So far, they have had no success. The software might be open, but the hardware is closed.
Wow, Thom once again at his greatest…
This story is 100% wrong. I am wondering: Did Thom even bother to read the source?
Here are the actual facts:
http://symbian.org has a support portal for Symbian developers.
Samsung closes its own developers support portal in favor of the upstream one.
That’s all Samsung announced. Samsung did not announce to no longer use Symbian in phones.
In fact German IT news web site (an actually credible one with real journalists) just went ahead and asked Samsung directly about what that story means for Symbian on Samsung phones.
Straight answer: Samsung will continue to use Symbian on its phones. Samsung even confirmed that there will be at least one new Symbian phone in 2011.
If you can read German, here’s the Golem article: http://www.golem.de/1010/78365.html
What is wrong with you? What is missing in your life that you feel the urge to attack me at every possible opportunity? Did I kill your baby? Did I shoot your unicorn?
I run this website pretty much on my own. I need to cover ten million topics, and I need to be an expert at ALL of them or else some disgruntled entitled brat such as yourself is ALL over me about something I got wrong.
I need to cover ten million websites, and now you expect me to follow German websites as well? Nevermind the fact that this German item was posted AFTER I had written this OSNews item (it had been in my Notepad before publishing it) or that no other major English site had posted about it yet – I’m magically supposed to know about this obscure German website? Dass meinst du doch wirklich nicht? Ich frage auch nicht von dir dass du alle Holländische Websites kennt und folgt oder was?
Of course, you could’ve just, YOU KNOW, used the news submission form, shot me an email, or leave a normal, kind comment pointing this item out to me – and like we usually do, I would’ve amended the article, no big deal. In fact, I’d’ve been happy to do so. Because, you know, I like that sort of thing. It’s why I do this OSNews thing.
But no, you don’t care about that. All you care about is attacking me. That’s what your entire OSNews existence revolves around. Attacking me, because I happen to have the balls to call out your precious little Apple on its flaws.
I’m SO happy none of my friends are geeks.
It’s not my fault that you turn the closure of some web services into the wrong claim that Samsung abandons Symbian.
Samsung does not abandon Symbian! There will be new Symbian phones.
If you combine it with this:
http://mobile.engadget.com/2009/11/11/samsung-dropping-symbian-for-…
It makes perfect sense.
But that’s not the point. The point is your tone. Your German item is interesting. However, you’ll need to learn to SHOW RESPECT, and submit it without acting like a dick. I know you hate me because I have the balls to call out Apple’s flaws, and that’s fine, but that’s no reason to attack me at every possible opportunity.
Like I said, I put an inordinate amount of work into OSNews, and I run this website pretty much on my own. I need to cover so many subjects in such incredible depth, that mistakes – and this item is not a mistake, since your update was posted LATER – are simply BOUND TO OCCUR. Most people on OSNews are incredibly kind and understanding of this, and send me an email or leave a kind comment if I make a mistake, to make OSNews better. To improve my understanding of matters.
Yet with people like you, that’s not why you do this. You only point this out because you want to attack me. That’s all you care about. It’s all over your comments. The aggressiveness is dripping out of every letter.
I’m sick of that. I work incredibly hard on OSNews EVERY DAY, and I WILL NOT let people like you piss all over that. Consider yourself warned.
Engadget got it wrong as well, turning the closure of some web forum into dropping Symbian.
Maybe Samsung will at some point in the future drop Symbian. I don’t know. But what I do know that that was not announced yesterday. All that was announced was the closure of some web services in favor on the upstream one at symbian.org.
Turning that announcement into “Samsung drops Symbian entirely” is wrong and it stays wrong. No matter if some other IT medium called Samsung or not.
If the story was “Samsung closes Symbian forums” it would have been 100% accurate. It could still fuel speculation of dropping Symbian but that speculation wouldn’t be turned into a fact.
Oh, if you don’t like other posters’ tone, you should start to not insult them in the first place.
For example in the comments section of the BlackBerry PlayBook news item, I simply wrote where the term “pad” for those kinds of devices originates from (Star Trek) and out of the blue you called me and everyone else who watches Star Trek “overrated crap”-liking “nerds”.
Adjust your tone and I’ll adjust mine.
I called Star Trek overrated crap – not you. I called people who watch it nerds – I watch it myself. I’ve never seen a non-nerd watch Star Trek. It’s a nerd thing. And that’s okay. Nerd is not a negative term at all. It’s just a designation. That’s all. Like how pom-poms are a cheerleader thing.
And don’t act coy. It’s not as if your aggressiveness started after the Star Trek thing.
No, they did not. That link contains a direct quote from Samsung itself, stating they will drop Symbian. How can that be wrong?
Edited 2010-10-02 10:40 UTC
Read my comment. I never wrote that. You called Star Trek watchers nerds who like overrated crap.
And that was just a recent example of your tone.
If you want respect from people, treat them respectful yourself. If you don’t want to be respectful to them, fine. But don’t bitch if someone uses the same tone as you towards you.
Get off your double standard and we can talk.
Not your link. Their story from yesterday.
Can we take trolling somewhere else? I mean, really. I kinda stopped trolling a few years back when my balls dropped.
As for you, Thom. *points at DO NOT FEED sign*
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t remember Samsung having many Symbian phones. I’m glad they’re not actually abandoning it, but the only Samsung smart phone that I know of that used Symbian is several years old and ran Series 60 V2. Granted that I’m in the states and we don’t exactly get the best selection of Symbian hardware sold here (let alone that work on our nonstandard HSDPA frequencies for 3G), but are there Samsung Symbian smart phones still, or are we talking mostly about feature phones?
Samsung single-handedly beat Nokia with the i8910HD. The N8 is still behind it when considering the CPU… A real shame about S^1 on that one, and that Samsung doesn’t support it much, only a little more than the Innov8 before.
Anyhow, I think the original interpretation is right. Samsung won’t make Symbian phones just for fun. At the bada Developer Day in Hungary, the Korean representatives said that there would be focusing on Android (40% of efforts) and bada (40%), with a little WP7 (10%) and LiMo (10%).
This has changed of course, they cut the Vodafone 360 program, so LiMo is out. But that was months after the Dev. Days.
And there was that other event, IFA, where they said they are “not seeing visible demand for Symbian.”
While the i8910 had the OMAP 3430 and state-of-the-art AMOLED at that time. It had a very poor firmware that crippled it from living up to any of its potential.
The i8910 had no voice dialing, poor audio recording, stuttered HD video recording and worst of all most of the S60 apps won’t work on it because Sammy refused to provide APIs to make it happen.
If it weren’t for HX, I’d completely trash that overpriced piece of junk. In comparison, SE does a far better job than Sammy when it comes to making their phones work as they should. But neither of them could ever match Nokia. Despite the PoS that is the N97, Nokia worked very hard to make it usable, can the same be said of SE or Sammy?
Let’s also not forget that SE and Sammy have a poor track record of fixing their firmwares on any platform, regardless if it is Symbian, Android, WinMo or their own proprietary OS.
And who is to blame there? Nokia-specific, in-house APIs are missing from the phone, like the VOIP Audio Server (making Nimbuzz and co. inoperable).
Sure, Samsung pulled an N97 with the phone ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU ), haven’t and won’t fix it up (not even like Nokia did the N97, though that was building a sandcastle from dogshit). But it’s Nokia’s fault that the S60 “platform” is crippled for licensees.
Maybe S60 was, but afaik Symbian^3 is fully open sourced at this point and out from under the total control of Nokia. So this shouldn’t he an issue now.
Oh puh-lease, if SE could license it for their phones, so can Sammy. Which is why there is full Skype for SE Symbian phones, but not the overrated Samsung ones.
I think you should stop drinking the Sammy kool-aid and call them for what they are. They suck at providing actual functionality and after sales support.
Tell me about it, I have an S8500 Wave.
After taking ownership of my brothers N900 due to its lack of support for Telstra’s NextG network, I have to say that the path Nokia has made with Maemo/Meego is a bright one for their future.
After researching their developments and the Meego’s community developments and after having hands on with the N900 – they have a great little system there.
Sure Symbian is their main OS for Smart Phones and sure it’s getting long in the tech tooth but with integration between Meego and Symbian 3 through the KDE toolkit and further development of Meego – the future looks good for Nokia Smart Phones.
I also like the communities efforts in porting Meego to Android devices. Nice.