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No problem, I've also toned down my reply.

Yep exactly, and that was why the Symbian Alliance formed. It was to prevent microsoft from doing what they did to the PC world. This is also one of the reasons ARM thrived instead of Intel.

The other lesson that is still being battled is patents, Internet protocol is essentially free. Wireless is not.

The other main difference is carriers, they are the gatekeepers to the valuable, yet resource limited spectrum that mobile phones need and therefore have a much larger control over the value chain than ISPs do for the Wired Internet.

NO! The Symbian Alliance Formed because Nokia wanted to control its competitors to such an extent to make them never able to best Nokia. They did that by doing closed versions of Symbian that were never open to the Symbian Alliance.

That happened later, Symbian spun out of Psion. The first Symbian based phone was the Ericsson R380. The biggest difference between all the members were that the ones who took control of a UI built up more control. These were effectively Nokia and Docomo, hence why Symbian was used so much in Japan on their "feature phones" and S60 became strong.

UIQ used by many of the other manufacturers was never developed by any of them and was effectively an orphaned UI company.

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