1. Symbian on Life Support - What lead to this?
Symbian is an open source OS and the biggest smartphone operating system by
market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use. According to Gartner, in
2010 Symbian is the best-selling smartphone system with 37.6% share overall as
almost all the leading manufacturers also use it on their devices. But in Q4 2010
handsets with Google’s Android software overtook sales of Symbian smartphones.
The Symbian platform designed for smartphones is the successor to Symbian OS and
was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT
DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., including Symbian OS assets at its core,
the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces. In December
2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS and announced a
community led by the Symbian Foundation will develop it, which officially launched
in April 2009. Recently Nokia announced that it would migrate away from Symbian
to Windows Phone 7.
Symbian was more designed to work on phones and PDAs and finds its origins in
Psion’s EPOC PDA Operating System but not on smartphones. Another critical issue
was Symbian needed an additional user interface system. Developers complained
about the difficulty in programming, the code was closely guarded and only Symbian
internal developers can develop and 80% of revenues were earned through consulting
for licensees. Licensees like Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, and Sony Ericsson also
encouraged delivering half engineered product so that they can add their own flavors
and differentiating from one another. This led to three incompatible and diverging
OSs: NTT DoCoMo's Symbian MOAP for Asia, Nokia’s Symbian S60, and Sony
Ericsson’s Symbian UIQ. Other technical issues include design issues like C++
development, no support for proper string handling, not a great support for multi
threading, bad development environment and lack of proper documentation and
resources.
Nokia played a critical role not only in the rise of Symbian but also in its fall. Nokia
was vey actively involved as it sold the most number of devices using Symbian OS.
Nokia influenced Symbian decisions and always blocked Symbian from developing
the OS and also forced Symbian to adopt Nokia controlled components. Even after
acquiring Symbian Nokia did not support the foundation in terms of human resources
and technology support. More over Nokia maintained its own internal line of Symbian
developers working on its own version of code, developed its own version of OS
NOS/S40 and it tied up with Intel to offer a new OS MeeGo. As a matter of fact
Nokia and its business strategy played a crucial role in ruining the Symbian OS. Now
it made a very questionable decision to go with Microsoft Windows Phone and
develop apps.
Does this mean it’s an end for Symbian? The fact is all the mobile phones in the
world are not going to be smartphones with big computing powers. High end
smartphones are more like mobile computing devices with a phone app for calls.
There will be always mid and low range segments in mobile devices where Symbian
does work well but User Interface has to be improved. Nokia and other Industry peers
along with developers community has to make sure that people understand the true
capability of Symbian is not to work on High end smartphones but focus on its core
capabilities of good battery life and lower hardware requirements.

2. Nokia and other OEMs are still developing handsets that need Symbian OS and there
is huge cumulative base of more than 300 million handsets already there in the market
and Symbian Foundation is itself focusing on improving the technical capabilities of
the code convenient to work on the modern day touch devices. All these factors
highlight Symbian will be surviving for some more time but soon will be dethroned
by Google’s Android as the largest smartphone OS. Android is seeing a huge rise in
its share as OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc are releasing significant number
of handsets into the market.
Discussion points:
1. What should be the Symbian future course of action?
2. Should Symbian try to compete with iOS, Android and Windows Phone
immediately or delay and focus on the mid segment phones?
3. What should Symbian Foundation do to attract developers?
4. How to attract the OEMs back to Symbian OS?