OStatic

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

?In October, the Symbian Foundation released the Symbian kernel sources to the world, and the rest of the world (read: developers) collectively responded, Great. Where's my Android phone? I've often lauded Google for its ability to fuse the marketing, PR and developer benefits of open source projects into one seemless operation. It would seem that Symbian could stand to learn a few things. The question is, is it too late?

Things are looking increasingly bad for Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, and they may be looking bad for Palm, too. As GigaOm notes: Like a desperate gambler down to his last few chips, Palm is ditching Windows Mobile and going all in with its own webOS. That will leave the Pre as Palm's big bet in the smartphone arena, and the company has said that the Pre now accounts for the vast majority of the smartphones that it sells (823,000 units in the most recent quarter, in line with analyst's expectations).

What's more notable to me, though, is that as the heavily fragmented world of operating systems for smartphones begins to whittle itself down to a few competitors, players that rely either entirely or partly on open source are making the best bets.

The smartphone market has remained very healthy throughout the economic downturn, and it looks like the next big area of opportunity for smartphones, mobile operating systems and applications will be China. As we reported a few days ago, the iPhone is headed to China through a deal that Apple has struck with China Unicom, and China Mobile--the market leading wireless provider--has increasingly embraced the open source Android operating system. Specifically, Dell's new Android smartphones are part of China Mobile's application platform, and? the company has its own Ophone operating system (based on Android).

It's already been clear that there will be a huge battle between open source and proprietary mobile operating systems in China, but now, as The Register reports, things are getting even more complicated. It seems that Symbian, the platform on nearly half of smartphones, could start gaining a Chinese foothold even before the iPhone and Android phones arrive there.

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