We take a look at what's soon to become an "open-source" Symbian, but does it really have any chance against Google Android OS?
In the almost ten years we've covered mobile technology here at infoSync, we've seen operating systems, platforms and device manufacturers rise and decline (and sometimes die) on a regular basis. In the fall of 2000, Symbian released version 6.0 of its OS as an "open to everyone" platform, followed by the announcement of Nokia's 9210 communicator.
At that time, the entire mobile industry came running to Symbian OS and the Nokia 9210 specifically. The amount of applications that was specifically developed for the Nokia 9210 before it had even hit store shelves was tremendous.
Here's how Symbian looked at the Nokia 9210 Communicator: "Nokia has today announced the first Symbian-based communicator - the Nokia 9210. The Nokia 9210 is the world's first next generation mobile phone to be based on the Symbian platform v6.0 - an open software platform that has been designed to enable third party developers to write powerful additional applications, services and content for users."
However, Symbian wanted more; they simply wanted touchscreen phones as great as any. Ironically, the whole idea of Symbian OS was to come up with a system that could easier follow the future mobile trends than what the old EPOC OS could.
Yet the software errors kept appearing when introducing new form factors to Symbian OS, ultimately leading to slowed down design innovation, and for the last couple of years, almost no design innovation whatsoever (except for the extreme slimming process, which is not thanks to Symbian OS anyway).
And that's where Google's Android OS is so different. Android OS simply offers no limitations whatsoever, so whatever the members of the Open Handset Alliance want to build, they can build it with Android OS at the core. That's the true kind of open-source OS; an operating system even a royalty-free Symbian OS will have difficulties competing with.
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