Interesting news this evening as the Symbian Foundation announce that they will be giving away the operating system for free starting Thursday 4th February (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8496263.stm).
I'll be interested to see if there are any old relics from the Psion EPOC days in the code.
Clearly under pressure from Apple, Google Android etc do you think their strategy will pay off? How do you think these open source operating systems will fare in the markets Psion Teklogix operates in?
Open source definitely has a lot of risks. As you brought up, Apple and Android have the two ends of the spectrum. And you notice a lot of problems this creates. With Apple, I know anything I ever download on itunes will always work (assuming you have the latest OS, which could cost you money, see the $10 charge for OS 3.0 for ipod touches). With Android, there are some apps which only work on certain builds of Android, and you sometimes won't know until you get the app which build it supports.
But with that risk comes a lot of flexibility and power.
Symbian OS is the most widely used operating system, but its popularity is definitely behind iPhone OS and Google Android. How many people using Nokia phone care about they are using Symbian OS?
Does Symbian fear of loosing people from their development community to other OS? Does Symbian attempt to increase their popularity by going Open Source that may keep their development community or even increase it?
Real question is, will their development community be able to generate solid business and enterprise applications to able to penetrate our market place? I think it will either not happen or will take a very long time.
Combing the principles of Open Source and the principles of Open Innovation, you can see that there is a crossover which changes the way (and speed) that innovation brings products to market. The idea of "open source hardware" is also not new, and may have a bigger future.
Read more at openinnovation.haas.berkeley.edu and see books by Henry Chesbrough on Amazon, etc
There is bound to be some old EPOC code rattling around there somewhere!
However it is not as open as say Linux is. You have to be a member to get access to the code and this requires you to be a company and to pay $1500/annum. The Symbian Foundation has combined the Symbian OS with Nokia's S60 UI to form the new Symbian.
One of the major things Nokia has done is to purchase and open source the Qt framework. This is used to native develop platform independent applications (most famously Google Earth is written in Qt). It now runs on Windows (Desktop), Windows CE/Mobile,Linux, OSX and Symbian OS. It is also the basis for the new MeeGo OS recently released by the Linux Foundation and formed from combining Nokia's Maemo OS and Intels Moblin OS.
The interesting thing here is that a company the size of Nokia (which at one point probably had more software engineers than we had employees) has decided to Open Source all of its top end software for both the top end smartphone (N900 etc) with MeeGo and mid range - 5800 etc with Symbian. So we are not alone in moving into a more open way of working.
There is an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of Markets at Nokia here and an interesting section here where he apologises for releasing buggy product (the N97) and explains what they are doing to fix it.
As Peter points out, Apple and Android get all the news, yet Symbian still has almost 50% smartphone OS market share and shipments grew by 11% in 2009 vs. 2008.
No one talks much about Windows Mobile & CE, the OS's that our industry is based on, but MS shipments were down only slightly in 2009 and could be set to grow again with the introduction of Windows 7 Phone Series (the next gen Windows Mobile for phones) and the expected update of Windows Mobile & CE for handheld computers later this year.
Apple Insider has a good summary of recent Gartner reporting on smartphone and regular mobile phone (dull phone? simple phone? non-feature phone?) sales and market shares. Skip over the Apple stuff at the top to get to the discussion about Symbian, Android and other OSs. Here is a table from that article - note that although Symbian market share has fallen almost 10%, the number of shipments (these are in 000s) have increased from 73 million to 81 million phones.
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2009 (Thousands of Units). Source: Gartner via Apple Insider.
As long as Nokia is using it on its phones, it will live.
As a developer I don’t like the OS, it is too hard to develop applications for. I tried with Netpad when it had the Epoc version and I have tried with Nokia 5800 with Symbian 5.
I think that the C++ language is too fare from ANSI standard, maybe Nokia realize that by acquire QT.