Symbian Foundation Backs Down To Android

[Karey Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/11/symbian-foundation-scaling-down-as-nokia-takes-charge.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss' target='_blank'>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news...tm_campaign=rss</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"In a press briefing this morning, the Symbian Foundation announced plans to scale back and shed most of its staff. The organization will become a legal entity that is responsible for managing Symbian licensing." </em><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/adt/auto/1289584833.usr110024.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Symbian Foundation has made the decision to cut back on it's staff and modify the company. It appears as if they&nbsp; recognize the growing popularity of Android and will try to rethink their marketing strategy. Does this mean that Android will take hold of the European market?</p>

[epdm2be]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/11/symbian-foundation-scaling-down-as-nokia-takes-charge.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss' target='_blank'>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news...tm_campaign=rss</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"In a press briefing this morning, the Symbian Foundation announced plans to scale back and shed most of its staff. The organization will become a legal entity that is responsible for managing Symbian licensing." </em><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/adt/auto/1289584833.usr110024.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Symbian Foundation has made the decision to cut back on it's staff and modify the company. It appears as if they&nbsp; recognize the growing popularity of Android and will try to rethink their marketing strategy. Does this mean that Android will take hold of the European market?</p>

I hope not.

As an full featured multitasking small footprint OS Symbian is unbeaten. It's a shame ppl don't realize this. Symbian phones don't need gigahertz snapdragon cpu's to be snappy. They operate with the most humble of cpu's and memory footprints yet maintain a very good feature-set.

E.g. Android phones still can't record phone-calls unlike Nokia/SE featurephones, symbianphones and a handful of Windows Mobile (NOT Windows Phone) devices.

Not to mention ppl's false impression that Android is a "free" OS while telecoms and hw-vendors do everything to lock-down devices. Sure, the hacker-community, which in the mean time started to appear, will play catch up and jailbreak,..I mean, ROOT devices. But as more (incompatible) variants of devices appear this will become increasingly difficult. Hence this community will/can only support a subset of popular (read HTC) devices. The more devices appear the less appealing Android's status will become. Especially Samsung is a king of flooding the market with cheap inferior devices (usually being sold on the reputation of one good device in their portfolio).

I predict that in time there will be a major dispute between several Android partners and that under presure a sepreate fork, perhaps under infuence of the hacker/linux-comunity, will apear. Breaking unity of Android devices even further. The funny thing is that now Symbian finally is a unified OS AND open source; now is it's popularity tainted. How weird.

Just mark my words. Android will break.