Symbian's open source platform debuts four months early

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Symbian's open source platform debuts four months early

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 5 February, 2010

READ MORE: Symbian Foundation | OS | Symbian

Finally, a wireless technology that not only hits its deadlines but beats them. As doubt still lurks over whether Windows Mobile 7 will ship this year, the Symbian Foundation has released the official source code for release 3 of its OS into open source, four months ahead of schedule.

Symbian is the market leader in smartphone OSs, but has spent 2009 in the difficult transition of its technology and licenses into open source, at least a year behind other open platforms, notably Android. However, as it starts to close the gap, and with chief supporter Nokia gaining ground, it will defend its lead aggressively once its new platform is completed later this year.

"There wasn't an open source alternative until now so we anticipate a proliferation of smartphone and other devices based on Symbian," said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances for Symbian in the US, the market where the platform most needs to make headway. AT&T recently made Symbian, and Nokia's Ovi Store, part of its new multi-OS smartphone strategy, alongside Android, iPhone, Palm webOS and Brew MP.

Analysts at Forward Concepts estimate that Symbian will retain its dominant share in a growing open OS market, but this will shrink over the next few years under pressure from Android. It will account for 38% of smartphones in 2014, compared to 43% now, especially as Nokia increases its use of its Maemo Linux OS at the top end of its range.

"Although Symbian will clearly drop in market share in the high end smartphone market, it is well positioned in the midrange and entry level smartphone segments that are both poised to grow," said analyst Satish Menon. In 2009, the firm estimated that Symbian had 43% share, followed by BlackBerry OS on 19%, iPhone on 15%, Windows Mobile on 13% and Android on 3%. Other Linux-based systems, including LiMO, Palm webOS and Maemo, made up a further 7%. Despite the close association with Nokia, Symbian is structured to be more vendor neutral than Android, with four governing councils to oversee its direction, and most of their work published publically. "That cannot be said of any other open source code," said Berkin, talking to Techworld.

Symbian is available online now under the Eclipse Public License, which allows developers to modify and distribute the code without requiring any licensing on the resulting commercial software. Symbian version 3 handsets should appear on the market late this year, by which time the significantly revamped platform, Symbian^4, will be unveiled, along with Nokia's promised rework of the Series 60 user interface.