Symbian Foundation Details its Mobile OS Plans--AT&T Buying In?
by Sam Dean - Dec. 05, 2008Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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The Symbian Foundation has now made its plans clear for the delivery of an open source Symbian mobile operating system. The first version will be ready in the first half of next year. The foundation has also announced a number of new partners, including AOL, Cell Telecom, Intrinsyc, ISB Corporation, Trusted Logic and Xenient. The new partners join 58 others, including AT&T, Texas Instruments, ARM, Broadcom, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, EA Mobile, Freescale, and many more.
"AOL welcomes plans for the formation of the Symbian Foundation and the open source release of its platform," said Jai Jaisimha, Vice President of AOL Mobile. "AOL believes that open source initiatives such as the Symbian Foundation and AOL’s Open Mobile Platform will be critical to the creation of a vibrant ecosystem in the mobile space." Jaisimha confirmed that AOL will work directly with developers and the Symbian Foundation on content and applications.
Newsfactor has an interesting story up including comments from AT&T director Roger Smith about how AT&T may standardize on just a few mobile platforms over the next several years, with Symbian being a "credible candidate." Symbian is going to need that kind of buy-in from a big carrier if it intends to get traction in the United States. The smartphone market is very fragmented in the U.S., and Symbian has primarily been a strong player in Europe.
The comments from AT&T, though, raise the question of whether it will make sense for AT&T to be both a Symbian OS supporter and the exclusive carrier for the 3G iPhone. It seems to me that by the time phones based on the Symbian OS are anywhere near being serious competition for the iPhone, phones based on Google's Android OS will represent the most credible open source competition for Apple's phone.
Could AT&T's interest in the open source Symbian OS be a divide-and-conquer strategy for diluting interest in Android phones and accompanying service plans? Is the company's interest in the Symbian OS for real? Time will tell. In the meantime, as we noted, HTC, the hardware player behind the T-Mobile G1 Android phone, has raised its shipment forecast for this year to a million units, up from 600,000. I'm betting the 2009 wave of Android phones, along with more useful Android applications, will shake the smartphone landscape up.
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