Yesterday, we covered Juniper Research's findings on the prospects for open source operating systems on smartphones, which it deems to be rosy. Juniper is predicting that open source smartphone shipments will double from 106 million this year to 223 million by 2014. In our post yesterday, though, I made the point that the Android operating system isn't even mentioned in Juniper's announcement, while Symbian, LiMo and others are.
When it comes to Symbian, many observers have noted that ever since June 2008, when Nokia announced that the Symbian platform would be open sourced, very little seems to have happened. Symbian owns about 50 percent of the global handheld market. So where is the open source push that everyone was expecting? There are some answers to that question emerging, and Symbian's impact on smartphones could be much bigger than many are predicting.
In a post today, InfoWorld reports that Symbian will soon begin beta testing Symbian 2, a customizable, open source version of the Symbian platform. David Wood, who is futurist and catalyst at the Symbian Foundation, tells InfoWorld that within a few weeks the software will be "functionally complete," and that there will be a Symbian Product Development Kit (PDK), which phone makers will use when building phones based on the operating system.
Wood's comments to InfoWorld follow on the heels of his conversation with Matt Asay, as reported here, where he made the point that Symbian has time to beat Apple's iPhone. While I was beginning to wonder why it was taking Symbian so long to shift to an open source strategy that many people think is promising, it's starting to look like we may see that promise come to fruition soon.
The Symbian platform is on so many smartphones, and comprises a large system of software and extensions, that perhaps it's no surprise it's taken a year for the first signs of an open source version of the platform to emerge. Android, too, prompted many questions about the slow rate of development around it during its early months in the wild, but is showing every sign of becoming a robust, market-leading open source platform--and not just for smartphones. It's going to be very interesting to see how many phones and partnerships Symbian's open source platform gives rise to, and it's way too early to write such a huge player off.