Sony Ericsson abandons Symbian for Android and WP7 | Hacker News Reader

Sony Ericsson abandons Symbian for Android and WP7

zdnet.co.uk

40 pointsgspyrou44 comments

Symbian is dead [0]. It has been for a while. And Nokia will be too unless it adopts a new strategy very quickly. The figures from the article make this crystal clear: "Symbian's global market share has gone from 51 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to 41 percent in the same period of 2010". It's equally clear that it is Android that has hastened its demise.

It am still astonished when I remember Nokia buying (the rest of) Symbian in June 2008. This seemed a bizarre waste of money. And so it proved. (The purchase of Trolltech was earlier, but surprising nonetheless.) Perhaps if they had done so years earlier, and open sourced it, then things might have been different.

My opinion on the failure of Symbian was the failure to enagage developers. That, and the most tortuous development environment and deployemnt process that I have ever witnessed. Perhaps this could have been fixed, given time, starting earlier, but corporate institutions historically don't behave in ways to allow this. Regardless, it was much to late by the spending sprees of 2008.

Nokia should shunt Symbina into the siding now and adopt Android immediately. It should get back to making great phones.

[0] It has its place in some phones, arguably, but how long would you choose to continue to develop and support it when there is no long term need.

More nonsense from the people that can't bother with studying the subject even a bit before speaking. You seem to be unaware of the developments with Nokia and Symbian for the past one or two years.

They are making an impressive effort to engage developers and they have made the development much more simpler and straightforward. People that have been developing for Android/iPhone have told me that the Qt SDK is competitive with those other tools when it comes to ease of development and speed of development. See: http://gigaom.com/2010/09/15/whats-it-like-to-develop-apps-f...

As for Nokia switching to Android, see this: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/24/editorial-nokia-isnt-buil...

Impressive efforts can still come to nothing, and so far the numbers aren't favorable. I got and started developing for the N900 when it came out, because I absolutely support the effort of truly being open source that Nokia is betting on.

It's just not working out so far. There are no users, the platform is immature, the N900 is not a good phone for users or developers, and most importantly: the Ovi Store is terrible. I released one piece of open source software and gave up on the platform after that experience.

Absolutely, anything can happen and Nokia do still have massive market share. I just don't see how they can catch up to Android and iOS at this point, massive effort or not.

Market share for a phone which is not used for purchasing many third-party applications isn't structurally very sticky. If it's a commodity appliance-like device with, at best, Google Maps and a ringtone or two, there's no real incentive to choose the same manufacturer for your next phone, apart from brand identity and UI familiarity.

It's pretty different with iOS and Android if you've invested much in applications. The platform effect kicks in, along with the network effect of the application markets, and makes the consumer increasingly sticky depending on how involved they are in purchasing third-party apps.

From what I've seen with the N8 prototypes, it looks, feels better than Symbian 5th and it's faster too. Some people have been using the N8 more than myself and told me that they are happy with them. Still, anything can happen :)

N900 was a cool project, but they didn't take it all the way to a commercial product IMO. It registered poorer sales than Symbian and it's always a bit behind when it comes to services & software support. A hacker-friendly and truly open source project, but I don't think that they wanted to invest too much in it, they were probably testing the waters for MeeGo.

I'm curious, why do you say that the Ovi store is terrible?

For one, the interface is a web site that isn't well-adapted to a mobile screen, so getting to the store is cumbersome in itself.

Secondly, downloading an app after buying it is very slow and frustrating. It involves adding a special APT repository with a unique key, and APT on the device is unusably slow.

Third, actually publishing on the store is, as far as I can tell, practically impossible unless you have a company and the name of that company is Rovio.

Third, they have no decent categories, no search functionality worth mentioning, very little information about each app... the list goes on.

As a final nail in the coffin, the prices are much higher than in the Android or iOS stores.

This is all from when I tried the store, needless to say I haven't felt any desire to relive the experience again so things may have changed. I really doubt they've fixed it though.

I don't know if you've used the store on a symbian device, the experience may be better there, but my experience was indeed terrible on the N900.

I really don't see Nokia turning around and putting out a fantastic mobile OS with a well-integrated experience that grabs customers, just like I have a hard time seeing Microsoft managing it. Although, Microsoft do have Xbox Live they could leverage.

That does sound bad. On Symbian the store is a separate app that takes care of everything for you. The install is done in the background and you can launch the app directly from the store app.

Each app has up to three screenshots and description text, but this depends on the publisheer.

Depending on when you wanted to publish, it might be better now because they allow individual developers and you get free signing (for Symbian).

P.S: As a developer I'm happy that the prices are higher. :) 0.99 is ridiculously cheap for software.

Two years ago was far too late. As I said, perhaps if they had started this initiative earlier then who knows? We've had nearly 4 years of the iPhone now, and nearly 3 years of Android, so this was a slow move and a late one.

I applaud the idea behind the Symbian Foundation, but it was too late to tackle Apple and Google.

Hmm,

I love Qt and I'd love to develop for Symbian.

I'm working on a Qt desktop app that might be a good candidate for a mobile port.

>>>I can't even find a Symbian phone in the US to develop on.<<<

I can't see any way to begin mobile development from the US at all - except order a Symbian phone from overseas or something. If you can't start work, it doesn't matter how easy things are.

(and yes, any Symbian folks who want to help me are welcome to come up with solutions)

How do you mean you can't find it? I live in the US, and all my phones have been Nokias for a while. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

http://www.nokiausa.com

I've heard that Nokia is almost nonexistant in the US. But the 5230/Nuron should be available.

It's a very cheap Symbian 5th ed phone, that's similar to the 5800 with no wifi/weaker camera and so on. It can get you far enough and then you can use the forum nokia virtual device lab for the rest.

Nokia might release the N8 to AT&T in 2011 judging by their Calling all innovators 10m $ competition.

Hmm,

Do you think they could finish porting Qt to Android and move their whole environment that way?

I believe that Google need to officially support the existing Qt Android port for it to catch on.

Sony Ericsson isn't that heavily into Symbian anyway. Most of their phones use a Java platform run on top of an OS - Symbian being one of the OSs, but they also use proprietary OSs for the cheaper phones. It was Java that was their focus.

They are just riding the Android and Win7 wave, while the competition isn't too high, and in the long term, I predict they will focus on their own platforms again. There's no other reason why Samasung would be developing Bada for example.

They always seemed pretty halfhearted about symbian I never saw promotion in the same way as their windows phones for instance.

Is still Sony-Ericsson relevant on the smartphone market?

Android phones made by SE are still based on the 1.5, 1.6 version and even the top of the noch, the Xperia X10, will not receive 2.1 till end of october...

It's sad but SE will not be missed by Symbian.

I used to have one of their older Symbian phones and my impression was that there was a lot of potential there but ultimately they couldn't pull it off.

This certainly isn't good news for Symbian, but I will hardly miss Sony Ericsson: regardless of the OS, they somehow manage to screw up a perfectly good smartphone.

It's a damning indictment of Symbian's failure that the HN crowd can't summon the energy to debate it.

RIP Symbian. You served a purpose, but now it's time to die.

Ok, for the sake of argument: there are a ton of people in the world who cannot afford a high end iPhone or even Android system. Are they not a viable market? I'm not sure whether Symbian is the best OS there, either, to be honest, but I do think that market bears consideration.

Don’t you think that really cheap Android phones will be a possibility in one to two years? That seems plausible to me.

The HTC wildfire costs 170 EUR, that's cheaper than any Nokia with the same functionality... All my mobiles have been Nokias so far, but the next one is going to be a Desire HD (just waiting for it to come out).

1 or 2 years? No. Lots of cheap (and some that aren't even all that cheap) Nokia phones here in Italy still are still sold with S40, which is the step below Symbian. And that's still in "the west". I don't know what phones are like in places like India, but I assume that the low end is fairly low end...

I have no trouble at all imagining that 100€ (unsubsidized) Android phones will be available soon. You can buy a 210€ (unsubsidized) phone from HTC right now on Amazon. That’s not far off.

That’s not a sudden death – I’m pretty sure that you will be able to buy Symbian phones in two years – but I think that there will be far less dumbphones in the future.

Could be. Another thing to consider though, is what Google's going to target with Android. Will they try and keep chasing high-end features, or will they try and go for a more complete range? In other words, I can easily see getting the 200 euro phone for 100 in a few years, but I can also see Android's requirements growing to mean that it needs tomorrow's 200 euro phone to run...

Or not! Interesting stuff in any case.

I've see Pay As You Go (i.e. non-contract) Android phones for 89 pounds in the UK, which is 105 euros. These are fairly low-end Android phones, however.

It's all about developers baby http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/appceler....

All the developers are over at iOS and Android. There are still some developers left over in the RIM and Windows Phone camp.

I am an iOS dev, Android dev and Windows Phone dev spending my time in that order. And most of that is on the one with the best market.

All the coup de tats in technology, an initial phase is stealing/attracting developers. Then comes the apps that people want. Then come thy platform and market. Rinse repeat. It is no longer just a phone strategy.

Symbian, Thy Game is Over. Nokia can maybe re-emerge as they still sell well, but seriously setback now.

They're not doing well, but they have 41% of the market share? Apple and Google dream of having that kind of market share.

I am pretty sure Apple would rather have the largest profits.

If only market shares were fixed numbers. Myspace was doing very well before facebook came along. How could a current (and falling, in nokia's case) market share garantee anything about the future?

There is absolutely no comparison between Nokia and Myspace. Nokia is coming out with new things like S^3 and running app contests to encourage development. Myspace failed because they did nothing when an unquestionably superior product came out.

I'll believe that when I see S^3 gaining any traction. Specially with everyone else that uses Symbian jumping on Android's bandwagon...

Just a heads-up: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/F/07/GLB_SMPHN0710.gif

Now, they've actually started to put up competitive phones in the mid-high-end of market, and top high-end coming in spring, so I'm not sure Nokia's going to fall that much.

Exactly. Also it seems that the UI is one reason symbian phones seemed to run so slowly - with any luck Qt based phones will run quicker.

Also, it shouldn't be too hard to target Symbian and Meego from the same codebase.

Coding for Symbian is not supposed to be too much fun, having good tools is half the battle and I expect the Qt tools to help, whether it'll be enough remains to be seen.

Apple has 3% market share, but 39% profits share. Which one would you choose?

Depends on a lot of other factors. In 1989, Apple enjoyed huge profits from the Mac. The management at the time made the wrong decision to focus on profits at the expense of marketshare.

Wrong decision?

I don't think they could compete on the cheap with Chinese clones with razor margins then as they can't today. It is simply a different business.

They are the only company that survived,Amiga, Commodore, Atari, Spectrum,all perished, so not so wrong.

If you ask the cheap product manufactures in China, all want to be Apple, life is better selling a small number of units at a high price that selling millions by weight.

4% when your median purchase is +600USD(huge margin) is as much as 41% of 60USD phones(and low margin).

So what will be their OS of choice for sub $150 phones with a keypad and without a large touchscreen? Or will that category of phone simply disappear?

Definitely.

I would bet a lot that the cheap (between $50-$150) phones few years from now will be basic medium-size touchscreen phones running something like Android and equipped with a bit older hardware, maybe a generation or two behind.

The cheapest Android phone I can find in my country is Samsung Galaxy 5, for 224€. And that's only two years down the Android lane. Two more years, and we're close.

Cheap Android phones are already here:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/03/huawei-ideos-hands-on/

"this thing is going to be launching for somewhere between $100 and $200 unsubsidized in Europe, Asia, and both North and Latin America. It's got 3G, WiFi, mobile hotspot capability for up to eight devices, and was apparently developed in direct partnership with Google, a sign that Mountain View is serious about taking Android 2.2 across the entire price spectrum."

I don't understand how it can be between 100 and 200. Why the large interval?

Because of the large geographic spread of "Europe, Asia, and both North and Latin America". These regions all price phones differently.

A200(A250), as it allways has been. SE have never made that many symbian phones.

Symbian is dead and so is Nokia..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com