Nokia doesn’t trust its Symbian mobile operating system any more and plans to equip many of its smartphones with the mostly open source Maemo operating system it uses in its Internet tablets, according to undisclosed Nokia sources speaking to the Financial Times in Germany (FTD). The Finnish company completed acquisition of Symbian just four months ago. So guys, that was €264m well spent.
FTD quotes a source close to Nokia saying: “Symbian is much too cumbersome to keep up with modern operating systems. We have to react.” Nokia hasn’t provided an official response; a Nokia spokesman only said that they don’t comment on industry speculation. But this is clearly dynamite stuff. If it is true, it would actually be a smart move; the investment in Symbian hasn’t yet borne fruit, and Nokia is steadily losing market share to former niche players RIM and Apple, and soon Android.
A first device, the Nokia N900 or “Rover” is expected for Amsterdam’s Maemo Summit in October 2009.
The FTD names Symbian’s old code as the reason for its poor performance. The software is based on Psion’s Epoc OS which was developed in the 90s. Symbian now consist of 20 million lines of code, that’s nearly as much as Windows XP has. Experts say that new central functions are very difficult to implement. This explains why Nokia needed so much time to come up with a touchscreen competitor for the iPhone.
The Nokia N97 from June 2009 required heavy tweaking on the Symbian software. It’s touchscreen OS still looks aged and the handling is far from easy and not always logical. Another pain for Nokia is Google’s Android OS. Devices like T-Mobile G1 and HTC Magic are selling very well. The HTC Hero with its Palm Pre like Sense UI is expected to be incredibly popular device which Nokia will struggle to compete with. Only Nokia’s hardware with strong batteries and good cameras is still an advantage.
Since June it’s obvious that Nokia has bigger plans for Maemo. They have announced a strategic relationship with Intel to “shape next era of mobile computing innovation”. The effort also includes “technology development and cooperation in several open source software initiatives in order to develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects, which will deliver Linux-based operating systems for these future mobile computing devices”.
Nokia wants to make the former geek OS a “mainstream platform”, said Maemo manager Quim Gil in July on a developer summit in Gran Canaria.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Nokia makes an acquisition just to throw it away. In the last four years Nokia spent billions to buy companies like Intellisync, Sega.com, Loudeye, Twango, Enpocket, Oz Communications, Gate5, Starfish Software, Navteq, Avvenu, Plazes and Cellity. Navteq alone cost $8 billion but it’s difficult to recognize a strategy in this buying frenzy. The mobile company solution from Intellisync, which cost $430 million, has been discontinued after three years and sacrificed in favour of Microsoft’s Mail for Exchange.
The whole last paragraph doesn’t make any sense. Each of those companies has played a major part in Nokia’s Ovi services strategy. Intellisync has become Nokia Messaging, their email solution, while LoudEye became the Nokia Music Store, Twango became Ovi Share, which allows you to share media, Gate5 and Navteq now form Ovi Maps, their turn-by-turn navigation product, and Oz Communications is used on S40-powered featurephones for email/IM, and will be used in S60 products soon, as well. Avvenu became Ovi Files, which recently was offered for free.
“Gate5 and Navteq now form Ovi Maps”
Is that worth the $8billion+? apple just uses google maps, i doubt they’re hindered enough to warrant $8Billion.
Google’s main business is supplying data to consumers, but they buy a lot (all?) of their data from third party companies. One of those third party companies is Navteq. So I’m not quite sure what point you’re trying to make…
Gone days of stylus and joystick mobiles. Only touch os will work.
I was always concerned about screen size, and used to go for slide phones before iphone, coz only they offered biggest screen for given size.
This is just a ridiculous post. Does not make sense at all.
“The FTD names Symbian’s old code as the reason for its poor performance” FTD’s source is so lost. Man, that OS is built to perform on low memory and low processor environments. They should look what kind of hardware is running these multimedia computers and how long with given battery power. Quoting this BS is just lack of better understanding.
For example Nokia E71 is running on 369 MHz ARM11 processor! That is capable of running WebKit based browser with Adobe Flash for example. When you had computer with 369MHz processor? Like 15 years ago?
I think people are messing with two different things here:
a) How long it takes to write application
b) How well it perform
A:
a) It will take longer to write good app to Symbian than using e.g. Java. But it is not that much, problem is that there is no enough good programmers (and if there is, they are immediately hired by Nokia) as it will take some time to learn.
b) It is BUILT and designed to perform well. That is the key point why it is so hard to program.
And one additional point:
Nokia actually grew their market share on smartphones on last quarter! So WHERE are these stupid rumors coming from that Symbian can’t perform. It is selling more than ever!
Who pays this guy?
If you think Nokia is going to leave Symbian anytime soon, u need to wake up.
I’m not a Symbian fanboy, but even I know Symbian is the core behind Nokia’s current and future success.
What’s coming out of TechCrunch next? “Microsoft doesn’t Windows any more and is hedging it’s bets on Linux?”
Seriously, just stop blogging.
STFU! You don’t like it, go fuck yourself!
Your observation is spot on! C’mon guys. Do some basic research before coming to such significant conclusions. A little research on the Symbian blogs would have helped you understand the quoted Nokia person was probably talking about the Symbian community’s (including Nokia) conclusion about the shortcomings of the current Symbian iteration and its decision to do a major shift in upcoming editions of Symbian.
My opinion is that Symbian isn’t going to stop being used by Nokia forever, just the messed up 5th Edition incarnation that is seen by most people as going nowhere.
Symbian Foundation is many months away from having its new OS/UI ready – so why shouldn’t Nokia go with something else in the meantime?
And to ensure the success of Maemo (as it hasn’t done so well before on the rather niche Internet Tablets), it makes even more sense to use it on more than just high-end devices.
When Symbian Foundation finally comes up with something, Nokia by definition will have to be the first customer – having invested so much money.
A few questions remain unanswered; What will happen to S60 3rd Edition, the Ovi Store, developers in general (most have already walked) and other licensees like Samsung? I’ve heard that other Symbian partners are also, or have, decided not to release more devices anytime soon using S60.
I’ve worked with the FTD journalists dozens of times in the past ten years i.e. set-up and sat in interviews with various FTD journalists including Wendel. The always sensationalise their headlines to get a reaction and very often used to get their facts wrong. They are not like the FT. And just who is the source from Nokia? Why would anyone believe ‘a close source said’ unless celebrity reading? this isn’t about Symbian and Nokia, this about FTD hype and ignorance on our part for believe and repeating it.
And as Ricky Symbian-Guru said, parts of the article don’t make sense. For example “It’s touchscreen OS still looks aged and the handling is far from easy and not always logical” – Nokia has developed S60 for years, not Symbian. Anyhow, with Symbian Foundation going open source, the UI developments will go faster and have more innovation, check it out, already 16000 downloads in two weeks http://symbianuibrainstorm.wordpress.com/
@Ricky:
As long as I need 5 different accounts for Nokia Music Store, Ovi Share, Nokia Messaging, N-Gage and Plazes it’s difficult to see an overall strategy in Nokias acquisitions. These services already exist for years side by side without any single sign on.
Ovi Share seems to be in freeze mode, the offices in Seattle were to be closed and the Twango founders have left Nokia. The bottom line appears to be that Nokia’s preferring to drop time, energy, and cash into building out its third-party APIs that allow more established sharing services to plug into Ovi rather than trying to pimp its own Ovi Share.
Intellisync was once a big mobile suite to push every kind of company information to phones, a real Exchange or Blackberry competitor. Now it’s only powering a beta email service for end users. Was this worth $430 million? Do you really see a strategy in those $7 billion acquisitions? Google needs only weeks to offer new companies’ services under their single sign on.
@Adonis:
Who tells you that Nokia will really stick to Symbian? You are trying to shoot the messenger. FTD says that Nokia is giving up on Symbian. They have their source, you seem to have only last year’s PR statements.
BTW: “Who pays this guy?” is one of Michael Arringtons “Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t” (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/28/ten-comments-you-think-are-cool-and-insightful-but-arent/).
Cadden is right. The last paragraph is mis-guided and defending it by attacking the lack of single sign on make little sense. I’m pretty sure you can use one Ovi account for most, if not all, of those services now.
With regards to Intellisync, Nokia Messaging is out of Beta (I think) and is certainly being utilised as a service that comes bundled with recent E-series devices so that they come with lifetime’s worth of push email service. It’s a pretty nice solution even as it stands. Just sayin’
With regards to the future of Symbian vs Maemo. I can see Symbian filtering down to low end ’smart phones’ that replace feature phones over the next few years as Maemo matures and powers more and more high end handsets.
I remember my first symbian phone. It was when I was working at O2, preparing the MMS launch, that must have been October 2003. I did not used Symbian anymore until last month when I got to use an N95 for my job. In about 6 years I have the feeling that this OS did not change at all and 6 years in this industry is a like eternity!
So if Nokia gets rid of Symbian it will be good riddance. Would be nice to see something to the level of Android and iPhone OS.
Your point would be reasonable if the N95 represented the current state of the Symbian operating system. In fact, the N95 was released in Q1, 2007 and has since been deprecated. Since then the OS has moved from 3.0 to 3.1, FP1, FP 2 and currently 5.0.
Your point is like saying you got a Windows 98 laptop for your job and going on to claim it’s just like the WIn 95 of old and thinking Win 98 represents current technology.
I personally like the Maemo platform. Sure, it isn’t the most user-friendly, but there is a lot potential in it.
Symbian just doesn’t seem to evolve fast enough.
I’ve said it for a year, Nokia should just develop in Android and give up fighting it.
Maemo is nice and all, but Android is billions of times better.
What’s the point in fighting Google anyways? Android is FREE and OPEN-SOURCE.
Just take Android, make a Nokia version of Android if you absolutely want, that is perfectly legal.
Anyways, I am pretty sure that Nokia isn’t 100% moronic, and they must have had about 500 engineers working on Android and preparing eventual Nokia branded Android devices since Android has been available as open-source code.
think Palm should do the same thing?
Yup. Palm’s application in the cloud thing is a nice try. But Palm probably started earlier than Android was available open-source. Android was open-sourced and available only since October 2008 while Palm showed the Pre for the first time just 2 months later.
The next Palm devices should definitely just use Android as basis and they can add their own Web Apps, multitasking and other user interface features on top of Android and keep that proprietary if they want.
Is Google’s Europe sales team not doing their job? Standardize!
About time they made the move to drop Symbian, it is just so primitive compared to what else is out there on the market, especially the iphone OS.
Don’t you have that the wrong way round? Or does the iPhone multi-task now?
Apple has left all the old guard mobile phone companies standing. Apple think in terms of collaboration and networks; open source apps much like their open source mac software. Nokia and Co think proprietary.
Apple and Google come from a different end of the IT spectrum compared to the traditional mobile phone companies. They’re masters at delivering customer value based on continual innovation. They’re leveraging a totally different cultural and technological legacy compared to other telecoms companies. And it’s working because smart-phones have changed the mobile phone market entirely. It’s not about hardware or how many pixels your cam-phone supports. It’s about software and media platforms.
Apple fought off MS, the King Kong of competitors, for a decade plus. The likes of Nokia aren’t going to make them sweat.
Funny you mention media platforms. With Nokia you can chose your carrier. That’s a media platform. Whereas with an iPhone you are married to (count them) ONE phone company! Innovation? I don’t think so.
Apple is just selling like Nokia would, closed products and trying to build monopolies, Apple is just even more expensive than anything Nokia ever did.
@Tom. Greater phone company choice doesn’t equate to greater innovation in handset software, design, and useability.
@Char. True, Apple products are more expensive. But you get what you pay for and in most instances, what you pay for is high end quality. We’ve seen it with the ipod (one of the most expensive players on the market) and we’re seeing it now with the iphone. The iphone platform is closed to an extent. But the apps, which go a long way to keeping the iphone platform fresh and innovative, are open source.
As for monopolies; I don’t believe even Apple could corner the entire mobile market with just one high priced handset.
“Apple think in terms of collaboration and networks; open source apps much like their open source mac software. Nokia and Co think proprietary.”
Did I just read that right ??? Seriously ??? APPLE thinking collaboration and open source, and NOKIA thinking proprietary ?? No, seriously, are you high ?
Nokia relied on its hardware advantages for a too long time. Now they realize that for phones, software also plays an important role, particularly in usability.
And that’s certainly a good thing for phone buyers as so far Nokia software was neither particularly usable nor stable (not as bad as SonyEricsson’s, but still bad).
Key is openness and costs. That’s where Apple, RIM, Palm and Google/HTC/Android are all messing up big time. As these are all pretty closed systems and all the manufacturers try to rip off their own customers (1$ per song? Forget it. Paying dollars for a silly app? Never!).
Whether the underlying OS is Linux, the base of maemo, or an open-sourced version of Symbian really doesn’t matter. Symbian as an OS isn’t bad, it’s the user-land software that’s bad. From a technical point of view, Symbian OS is actually better than Linux.
Android is by far much better than Symbian for optimizing advanced software features to many different optimized hardware platforms.
Yep. Nokia need to take that front seat on the Android bus that Google have been saving for them. ^_^
you know this could be the best thing nokia has done in a long while.. its pretty obvious something is slowing them down in the software innovation stakes. its obviously a huge risk but they’re surrendering the handset market year on year.
would be great to love nokia phones again but its been a good 6 or 7 years since thats happened.
If this is true, it’s probably just that someone had to take the bullet for Nokia f#$king up and not achieving the technology integration that apple and google have.
This gives them an excuse for being short-sighted.
I for one say “good riddance”.
Having developed mobile software for much of the past ten years, all I can say about Symbian was that it absolutely sucked to work with. Everything was 10x more difficult and expensive than it needed to be. Windows Mobile was actually more of a pleasure to deal with, which really says something.
I’m in agreement that Symbian has had it’s day, at least in it’s current incarceration, but I’d hate for Nokia to use Apple as a model for so-called innovation. Hell, just an hour ago I watched a TV commercial for an iPhone that was touting it’s ability to Copy and Paste!! If that’s a feature, then their engineers must have been living under a rock for the last five years!
Have you ever tried to do anything useful with an iPhone, write a blog post on a train journey, or send a text message while walking down the street? Yeah, I know, it can’t be done.
When you get past the bling there is not much to an iPhone, and now their 3GS is touting the equivalent of Desqview from 286 days, while Nokia has had a true multitasking OS for years. And a Nokia phone can be used as a modem, and it supports VPN’s, and IPSEC, and a myriad of corporate requirements.
Steve Jobs is today’s version of P.T. Barnum, proving over and over, there’s a sucker born every minute.
In some aspects Nokia S60 is more advanced than Android and iPhone OS, for example, Nokia S60 FP 3 is the only smartphone OS which comes with a native Voip support out of box (not all devices though).
No need for an expensive customized Maemo experience on a cheap commodity device in say… rural Africa. They’re just adding to the mix.
This article is seriously mistaken on so many things, but the biggest mistake is to assume that Nokia is only going to use one OS for their phones.
Nokia have NEVER used just one OS, there has always been two OSes running in parallel, one for their cheaper phones and one for their more expensive models.
Until now Nokia’s used a proprietary OS (nicknamed NokiaOS but also known as Series 40) on their cheapest phones, with Symbian S60 on their mid-range and high end models. What they’re doing now is moving Symbian S60 onto cheaper mass-market devices while the top end will be Maemo Linux, with NokiaOS/Series 40 presumably falling off the edge.
Obviously people who only buy highest-end devices would no longer be using Symbian if that happened, but most people don’t buy high end devices. Most people buy low-end devices that cost under $100, which is precisely where Symbian is now headed. The sales figures of sub-$100 devices are close to one thousand million units per year, which at Nokia’s market share would be about 300 million units. So even if it goes downmarket Symbian’s device sales might be expected to skyrocket as a consequence.
Symbian isn’t meant to be a computer OS, it’s a phone OS, and it’s very good at running on cheap hardware. No other phone OS handles low price hardware so well.
@Tom F – You sound like a Nokia guy who can’t accept the fact that Apple OS is capturing the hearts and minds of millions of consumers. The iPhone is no gimmick. Nokia has to accept that, and compete. Hopefully, Maemo is another horse Nokia can bet on.
@Marcus – One more value-add Starfish Software – Is the heart of data synchronization and address books for Ovi and other carrier customers worldwide. Hard to put a price on infrastructure that powers millions of users…
“You sound like a Nokia guy who can’t accept the fact that Apple OS is capturing the hearts and minds of millions of consumers. The iPhone is no gimmick.”
For Apple and Nokia to be in competition they’d have to be selling the same kind of products to the same kind people, which just isn’t the case at all.
Nokia’s annual sales are about 400 million phones. Apple’s are about 15 million.
The iPhone is about $500 unlocked. The average sale price of a Nokia phone is closer to $50 unlocked.
Apple has one phone model per year aimed at one niche, Nokia has 40 models covering a wide range of niches.
Nokia’s worst sales area has always been the US, even before Apple entered the market. Apple’s strongest sales area is the US.
Nokia’s mainstay in sales and profits has always been its mass market products, the kind of things you’ll find used across the globe in both rich and poor countries.
Apple by contrast makes consistently very expensive products, and has never gone after the mass market in their entire history.
They both make phones… so what? Is Toyota in competition with Rolls Royce because they both make cars?
Saying that Maemo is in competition with OSX might be fair, but Nokia as a company bears very little resemblance to Apple as a company.
Nokia OWNS the worldwide smartphone market. Recent market research places its share at 42%. Yes everyone. 42%. To Apple’s 15%. After the iPhone the Nokia 5800 is the best selling touch screen phone on the planet. In fact, I think these surveys miscategorize “feature phones” that are really “smartphones”–if so Nokia’s share is even higher. For example, the Nokia e66 is a smartphone but my bet it is classified as “feature phone”
Smartphones were evolving in the rest of the world from the end of the 1990’s. Nokia has been at it since then and has a portfolio of smartphone products. Apple has been at it for a couple of years and has a single product.
Yeah that’s why Apple has the 30% of the whole mobile industry profit with only 8% market share. I’m sure Nokia enjoys selling cheap crap for a couple of cents profit LOL
Got a source on that 30% figure? And what about that 8% ? I think you’re talking smartphone figures, not OVERALL phones, buddy. Overall Apple share is about 1-2%, let’s get our facts straight.
First, Symbian is an open source OS. Second, this guys comments were interpreted totally out of context. It is true that Nokia (along with other Symbian users) have realized the limitations of Symbian in the context of future needs. To respond they are already working on the next generation of Symbian. It will be a major change, so much so as to eliminate backward compatibility. However, the Symbian community just authorized the new spec for delivery in about 2 years.
Yeah, Symbian is going open source, as many have said here, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they stick to it. They’d be dumb not to check out their other options, but I think we’ll see Symbian on Nokia phones for a long, long time.
nokia web tablet user N770 ,
dumped by nokia and the whole set of N770 users left high and dry without development help, or access to new N800 N810 back port apps
… guess what nokia your dumped! …
nokia may well move to maemo and may well have a winning OS but
‘you only dump a set of users once’. me i am spending my money on samsung i7500 and android.
Hi everyone, I am a Nokia employee and would like to share this with you for clarity. Contrary to some stories questioning Nokia’s commitment to Symbian. Earlier today Gartner released their Q2 marketshare figures for smartphones, in which Nokia grew from 41% to 45%. Symbian has 45% of the smartphone market. Nokia has no intentions of abandoning the world’s most popular smartphone platform. One that is increasing in popularity. Sorry to disappoint some of you, but these are the facts
Hi Ray, I saw Gartner’s Q2 report you referred. But it seems you make a mistake reading the numbers…
This is the original words from the report:
“In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Symbian held 51 per cent share, down from 57 per cent a year ago, while RIM and Apple grew their shares year-on-year. Android’s share was just under 2 per cent of the market and more Android-based devices will come to market in the fourth quarter of 2009, intensifying competition in the smartphone OS market, particularly for Symbian and Windows Mobile. Microsoft’s share continued to drop year-on-year to account for 9 per cent of the market in the second quarter of 2009.”
Face it or not, these are the facts! But from your comment, I can understand why Nokia skewed.
Gosh, they spent 8 billion aquaring navteq, no wonder they can’t afford to build proper phones anymore.
For some reason Tech Crunch is hating on the Symbian OS, blaming it for many of the issues that have developed in Nokia’s quest to produce an iPhone killer worthy opponent. Could it be that the Nokia team is trying to force an OS onto the hardware instead of developing an ecosystem that will efficiently blend the hardware with the software? I can put hackintosh on my PC – but that won’t make it a Mac.
For more of my thoughts you can visit:
http://www.thetelecomblog.com/2009/08/14/rumors-of-the-death-of-symbian-are-grossly-exaggerated/