Nokia buys Symbian, turns software over to Symbian Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Nokia buys Symbian, turns software over to Symbian Foundation

engadget.com

18 pointschaostheory19 comments

I love reading stuff like this.

"Okay we're going to acquire you then immediately release all the IP we just bought to a NP to turn it into OSS"

Of course it's a smart move for Nokia and they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but at least it shows they're not, well, stupid.

Wow, Nokia learns fast :D I said, in the tread about open source developers who need to be reeducated, that Nokia is the one which needs to be reeducated and they were smart enough to do it. Cool. Imagine apple doing that :D

imho top management at nokia still have the same position. for me, this is just PR, they're still control freaks

How many companies open source their products out of good will? Motives are not that important, results are. I'm curious about the results and don't care about the motives.

Is Nokia getting cold feet from all this excitement about Android and other open source mobile phone platforms? RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market, which, as far as I know, is pretty much the only part of the mobile phone market that's expanding in the developed world.

This move kind of puts into perspective their recent comments about how the mobile phone industry works differently from the open source world. Doesn't look like they have much confidence that that will be true for much longer.

"RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market"

That's a bit silly. As of Q4 2007 Nokia has 52.9% of market share for smartphones, part of the 65% for Symbian. RIM has 11.4% and Apple has 6.5% (impressive for only a year after launch). See http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm

They have a 6,5% share in Q4 and not overall, basically all those numbers out there only mention quarters and not overall market shares and that's very misleading. I have seen this on Techcrunch and many other blogs, where they put out 20% market share for the iPhone but if you consider there to be some 300 Mio. smartphones out there you get the real numbers ;).

Well spotted, I hadn't realised these were for Q4 sales, rather than market share in Q4. The 7% for the iPhone makes much more sense in this context.

Could you clarify please?

Apple sold 6 Mio. iPhones till June and the whole smartphone market is about 300 mio. phones, that's 2%.

The percentages mentioned on Techcrunch and all the other blogs mention selling figures per quarter. e.g. 35,522,360 smartphones sold in Q4 and 2,320,840 iPhones that means only 6,5% in this quarter and not in the whole market. I think it was 26% in Q1 2008 and 19% in Q2 2008 but as you see their market share is still only approximately 2% of all smartphones.

Are those US or global figures?

26% and 20% were US figures, that was a little mixed up I think - sorry. The rest was global.

Apple isn't even in the smartphone market yet. You can't install apps.

So, at this point, Nokia has invested time, money, and/or developers in the following platforms:

Mimeo (Linux, Gtk+ shell) Qtopia (Linux, Qt shell) Symbian (Symbian kernel and shell)

Tell me again how this looks like a reasonable strategy? If I'm a smartphone application developer, which platform(s) am I going to target? The three incompatible APIs supported by Nokia, or the three APIs which will get me onto every other major device on the planet: Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Mobile Cocoa?

It may be too little too late. Symbian is dead on the smartphone right now, but Nokia's iron grip on the mobile phone market is going nowhere. It will need a complete tear-down and rebuild, and quick, to be effective.

I was shocked to see that DoCoMo (Japan's dominant mobile telephony provider) is contributing to this effort. They are infamously proprietary.

It's good to see a British technology doing so well, when just about everything else has been Americanised.

Finnish?

Symbian is a spin-off off Psion, a British company founded by Brit Potter.

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