In a dramatic strategic move, the Symbian Foundation has made source code for the world’s most widely used mobile OS completely free and completely open. In addition, the Foundation says devices for the North American market — the only developed market Symbian hasn’t cracked — are on their way soon, with a partnership with Qualcomm Inc. helping to raise the platform’s visibility in the big domestic CDMA carriers like Verizon Wireless and Sprint-Nextel Corp..
The foundation had previously announced its intention to become the dominant open-source mobile platform but until now has not made good on that promise — it’s a delay that has allowed the open-source spotlight to move to Google’s Linux-based Android OS, which is set to power a whole raft of lower-cost, fully featured devices and gain a significant chunk of developers’ share of time over the course of 2010. Symbian hopes to wrest the “innovation” title away from Android with its release of the code.
“We don't know where this is going to go in terms of where people will innovate, but the OS is built to support emerging devices,” said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances at the Symbian Foundation. “The kernel itself is intended to be power-efficient and perfect for supporting low-power devices. Linux can't really argue that. As the market matures and the unit volumes increase for things like tablets and slates and other new connected devices, you'll see a lot of activity from us.”
Symbian will be an integral part of the value chain as applications take the main stage, he noted. “The innovation factor for devices is moving up the stack,” Berkin said. “Industrial design used to be the most important thing to users, but now it's the user experience. In five years, everything will be mobile.” Being open, he said, will allow the Symbian community to adequately work on that goal, with thousands of participants potentially lending their voices and ideas.
“We want to be community-driven, a meritocracy,” said Berkin. “We have no profit model, nor any other motivations other than making Symbian succeed.”
