I see a lot of analysts predicting the eventual demise of Symbian ! Here is what we think about it.
a) Inside N.America, Symbian is unheard of – most think that iPhone OS , Blackberry and Android are the only platforms.
b) The Symbian foundation has no money to talk up the media – most bright minds that once worked on Symbian have moved on.
c) What Nokia forgot when trying to build smartphones was that in the consumer world – looks is everything – the S60 user interface does not stand a chance.
The person on the street judges an OS by its looks – Symbian had UIQ, S60, S80 the native Avkon, just too many but none could match up to what the consumer demanded.
So yes, Symbian is in dire straits ! But there is a glimmer of hope – the new Qt interface is good and comes with bells and whistles that Android and iPhone boast off. The other is that Symbian smart phones are reaching the mass market stage, and reaching the youngsters in India’s 500 million strong market, in much of Africa and Symbian remains strong in Europe.
In a nut shell it is just too early to predict anything, yes, no doubt Symbian has lost market share, but in this very fluid cell phone market waves come every six months, never know who is riding the next one.
At the turn of the century, Symbian lead the way – and like many software companies we joined in the fray writing apps. There were no app stores then and app distribution was haphazard at best. Symbian grew rapidly outside of N.America commanding at one time almost 70% share of the smart phone market. What drew us to the cell phone was not only the mobility but the possibility of using sensors within and without the cell phone. If mobility was the liberator, blue tooth was the bridge to innovation. A crop of GPS devices came around, a new industry was born.
All of a sudden iPhone appeared on the seen and took the N.American market with storm. The facebook generation was quick to embrace it. Whilst all this was happening Android came from behind the scene almost from the shadows and we now see its shadow to be the biggest of all that will eclipse all others, and here is why:
a) Open and Free
b) Supports Adobe Flash - reason – Flex is the best RIA platform on the web – supported by a huge developer community who can make and break any mobile OS platform.
c) Mapping and Navigation come free. Location app market continues to grow, but my point has always been that location by itself may not be huge, but if location is used as a dimension in data it is going to mammoth.
d) Wide acceptance in the hardware circle from Korea to Chile, US to India – a huge number of of devices (cell phones included) are porting Andorid
e) The survival of any platform depends on the number of developers behind it. The number of Android developers is roughly equal to the number of Java + (C++) who can take to programming it in a few hours of orientation. Programmers love “what else can be done” and Android provides that.
The only reason why Andorid may fail is because of fragmentation – Moto Andorid and Samsung Android etc – I hope that is controlled and managed.
Geopresent provides Android software development so feel free to drop us a line.
