Move raises the stakes in Nokia’s rivalry with Microsoft as the two now control cell phone software. Top mobile phone maker Nokia moved Monday to take control of the world’s leading cell phone software group, Symbian, drawing a line in the sand between the Finnish firm and rival Microsoft.
Nokia Buys Control of Symbian
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Eugenia Loli
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dear nokia,
you have ensured a role for palm and probably linux in the phone market. i am sure that everyone at palmsource thanks you. I am sure that someone in the linux world thanks you too. i just don’t know who.
with over 60% of symbian, nokia can’t pretend that symbian is a indepedent company anymore. it is not, and the minority share holders (siemens, samsung, etc.) will support something anything else. In time, my guess is that symbian will become nokia only because the other phone vendors are going to phase it out. they have no interest in supporting nokia. Motorola has already been doing this in favor of linux.
The symbian OS is still the best OS for a mobile phone device (or a PDA phone). I doubt that other companies will start phasing it out without some sort of viable alternative.
Actually, I think the move is fueled more by a need to break away from Psion than anything else. Psion’s interests lie in a completely different field: mobile devices for various niche industries; it didn’t even put its own Symbian OS on its latest machine, the netBook Pro; instead it opted for Windows Mobile. Nokia buying Psion’s share, I think, is less a sign that Nokia wants to dominate Symbian than that it wants to finally get the Psion legacy off of Symbian’s back. I’m guessing that Nokia will get more control over the software, but this is a good thing, because Nokia has indeed been the major innovator so far, and with more control comes more innovative devices.
I’m sorry, Ryan, but I think you are wrong about phone makers defecting to Palm. First of all, Palm’s interests are just as strongly vested in marketing its own phones (aka Handspring Treo) as are Nokia’s. But, unlike Palm, the Symbian platform already has a variety of phones on the market, with plenty of phone-specific software. More importantly, Symbian phone makers are able to modify the Symbian OS as they please to work uniquely with their phones; not so with the Palm OS. Furthermore, the Symbian shareholders have some say in the Symbian OS’s development; with Palm they have none.
As for Linux, I agree that it will become a major player, but this won’t be a threat to Symbian for quite some time. Right now the only real option for handsets, so far as I know, is Trolltech’s solution, which still has limited support. Over time, I expect to see more customized versions of Linux coming out from various phone makers, but for now, it’s a side-story.
Microsoft seems to be the biggest Symbian threat right now, with Motorola and Samsung defecting left and right. Sony seems dedicated to Symbian on its phones, although there’s a chance it might switch to Palm at some point, since it does have extensive experience developing other Palm OS devices. However, Sony will never switch to arch-nemesis Microsoft if it doesn’t have to. In the meantime, I predict the European makers (Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Nokia) are going to stick together in the fight against American monopoly.
I would have to mostly agree with Ryan, in this case.
If these other vendors choice is only Microsoft, they will either create an joint alternative to Symbian (most likely based on Linux or *BSD, possibly not) or find someone who will provide that alternative.
The licensing costs will be a big factor against Microsoft and possibly Palm. In any case, this move by Nokia opens the door for just about anyone else that can prove they have a better (and cost-effective) alternative.
Moochman,
I frankly believe that symbian is the best phone OS (for those with normal sized screens) on the market. Series 60 in particular is awesome. I am confident that palm’s foray into low to mid-end phones with the former os 5 will render something worthy of competing with symbian though and palm has a lot of software that can be altered for the new screen size.
The phone makers will not give wide support to MS..a phone here or there to keep nokia/symbian in check yes but not wide support. No one in the cellphone industry trusts microsoft or their products. Everyone recognizes MS for what they are: someone that seeks to commoditize hardware and shift profits from phone makers to an OS vendor called MS. No one is going for that except the weak phone makers who see MS as a source of capital. CNET is repeating the MS corporate line. I work in the cell phone industry, and i am repeating what i’ve heard.
This is about something other than who has the best GUI or software support. It is strategic. Nokia now controls symbian. The other vendors only have a say if nokia decides they do because nokia has a controlling ownership (>60%).
Support for symbian from its other partners (not nokia) has been lackluster from the start and that has never changed. Its only going to get worse. The other phone vendors are eager to maintain a competitive OS market for phones. They don’t want to be held captive to anyone in a DeLL-like state of existence. They definitely won’t be held captive by nokia, a competitor.
Palm can succeed here and pick up business if it prices its newly named OS 5 correctly and gives it a nice phone oriented gui. I am thinking sub $2 per phone price point is necessary. that may seem low but we are talking about an addressable market of 250-300 million units (annual shipments of non nokia phones). If nokia’s market share goes down (which i think it will eventually but not in the short term) the potential opportunity goes up.
Nokia’s majority control is not a good thing, I think. Symbian had a very strong chance against Microsoft had it been owned by several handset manufacturers instead of one owning the majority. That way, the manufacturers had a good incentive for making Symbian phones. Now, instead of being an incentive, it has become a disincentive because Nokia will reap the major benefits if Symbian stays the standard. No company would want their direct competitors to benefit off of them and this is especially true in the cut-throat cell phone industry. Manufacturers may now have to look at other options and the best option is Linux (trust me, i’m not a zealot) because it is open and one that I think can be made robust enough for cell phones. Nokia can claim that they will keep Symbian at “arms length” but it is completly unbelievable.
I wish this hadn’t happened.
I am going to buy motorola cell phone with windows mobile because its the coolest
and has the best integration with windows and same cool windows UI and i guess it has media player too whoo hooo
when companies get ahold of something really cool, alot of the time they screw it over. I’ll wait and see what happens………. I still love PalmOS
I’m sorry, Ryan, but I think you are wrong about phone makers defecting to Palm. First of all, Palm’s interests are just as
strongly vested in marketing its own phones (aka Handspring Treo) as are Nokia’s. But, unlike Palm, the Symbian platform
already has a variety of phones on the market, with plenty of phone-specific software. More importantly, Symbian phone
makers are able to modify the Symbian OS as they please to work uniquely with their phones; not so with the Palm OS.
Furthermore, the Symbian shareholders have some say in the Symbian OS’s development; with Palm they have none.
None of this is really true. PalmSource is the company that does PalmOS, and is completely independent from palmOne (the hardware part of what used to be Palm). There are a number of companies making PalmOS smartphones besides palmOne — Samsung being one of the bigger ones. (Samsung will have a pretty big presence at the PalmSource developer conference this week, I think.) While PalmSource is not a consortium, but rather an independent company responsible for PalmOS, hardware manufactures have a lot of flexibility in what they do with the OS. Perhaps not as much as they may have with Symbian — but this is just as well an advantage, as PalmSource has a strong interest in keeping PalmOS a true platform with software compatibility across all devices using it. And you can be sure that licensees with a strong presence (either in sales or money supplied to PalmSource) can have a significant impact on the development of the OS.
What does the Motorola A835 use?
This one.
http://3gnewsroom.mobiles.co.uk/three-3g-motorola-a835-3.html
I’ve nothing against MS … But saying that they have some kind of influance over the mobile phone market?!? Even CP/M has more users 😉
I think if Nokia holds this majority control, then yes, it could turn some phone makers off in the long term… But what if, (Now, mind you, I don’t know how likely this is, as I’m not a businessman) but couldn’t Nokia invite the other companies in the consortium to balance it out again by buying more shares? I mean, that’s what happened initially, right–it was Psion, Nokia and Motorola, and then a bunch of other companies joined… So couldn’t a similar balancing process occur again?