Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source 189
Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening."
Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."
Drivers too, please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Since Nokia is phone manufacturer itself and main supporter of Symbian, I really hope they open source their drivers for different phones too. Nokia is already moving in that direction with Qt and it doesn't impact their main business as a phone manufacturer. Only problem would be if those drivers use licensed patents from other manufacturers though.
Android being open source is practically useless because you cannot get drivers for any phone. Sure you can see the OS code and tinker around it (if you are able to get overly complex development environment set up), but you are unable to use it on your phone or do pretty much anything with it. It's only good for phone manufacturers.
If Nokia also were to release drivers for their phones, this would be huge victory against Android.
Re:AT&T's E71x (Score:3, Interesting)
When I bought an N73 I was able to use a collection of tools to remove the simlock and flash the phone with Nokia's stock firmware. The result was massively improved performance and battery life, but I'm not sure if this is still possible.
Re:"By putting Symbian fully in the public domain" (Score:4, Interesting)
People these days, with all the overloading talk of "intellectual property" don't even know what "public domain" means. I see it all too often with my friends and family. It's getting to the point that copyright is so overreaching (and has been for so long), that few people even know what it means when a work no longer is under copyright.
That said, having Symbian under an open source licence is definitely a nice thing.
The FAQ warns about software patents... (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the FAQ [symbian.org] you can now get all the source and can (at least theoretically) build the OS and various applications. Groovy.
Setting aside the fact that just building all of the pieces is complicated (see the FAQ), and also setting aside the fact that many phones will refuse to run homemade, un-signed builds, you might run into issues with patents:
Having the source under an open license is just one step on the path to personal control over your phone and freedom to use, share, and modify the software running on it.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Interesting)
Nokia will be forced to adopt Android shortly I think (year or two). There's only room for one other player I think, but I'm pretty sure it's Windows Mobile (though force of will) or PalmOS
On my Nokia E71 I have Nokia Maps and Google Maps, I have Gizmo SIP VoIP and Skype, I have virtual assistant call manager software, I have ssh and irc clients, I have msn/icq client, and I can turn it into a wifi hotspot. I can run any application anybody has written for the device. If the choice becomes Android, Windows, or iPhone, then I'm not upgrading until they turn off the last GSM base station.
Phillip.
Death rattle (Score:1, Interesting)
Feature phones will be gone by the time anyone does anything with this. The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going because the screen supports the Web. If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix. Fixing Symbian to be modern should have happened a long time ago if at all.
These hardware companies are getting killed by Apple because Apple is a software company. They spend much more time designing the software interactions than the physical hardware, which they reduce as far as possible to keep it out of the way of the software. My Apple Logic Studio is bigger than all of my other apps combined by about 10 times and costs $100 per year to stay current. Apple layers on the software, their devices do much more because they have software resources that completely outclass the competition. The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that. Nobody cares what kernel is in their phone, they care that it surfs the Web, is fast, doesn't stall, is easy to use.
Nokia moving to Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Death rattle (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix.
Uh, what?
The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that.
They are. It's called Maemo, and it's on the N900. Unfortunately, not all parts of it are Free and Open.
Re:Still need signed apps though don't I (Score:3, Interesting)
Except its LOTS more crappy than pc suite. I'd consider it an alpha version. Shows some promise, but they need to finish it.
I just installed on my win 7 x64 machine at work here and I'm probably going to go back to the old pc suite.
It keeps offering ovi maps 3.0 for my phone, which is NOT compatible with it (6110 navigator). If I go to the "maps" section it says there has been an internal error, and helpfully suggests I restart ovi suite, and if that doesn't work I should try and restart my PC. WTF?.
There is no "sync" log to see what contacts/calendar entries were updated after a sync.
And yesterday it started crashing about 30 seconds after my phone connected (via bluetooth). Every time.
I unplugged my bluetooth dongle, started it, disabled all the sync stuff and plugged my phone in. ovi suite connected to the phone, then blew up again.
And then it offered me an update to ovi suite, would I like to install it? I said yes please, and it failed with an "unknown internal error" halfway through. Tried it like 5 times, same error. In desperation I started ovi suite with "run as administrator" and what do ya know, it updated. And now it won't crash when I connect my phone.
What Progress!
But I'm still in shock that their new flagship desktop application for working with your phone, probably designed to compete with itunes (not that thats really a worthy target, but I digress...) DOES NOT RUN PROPERLY WITH UAC ENABLED.
k'mon nokia, you released this app since 7 came out. and its not properly compatible with 7, or vista.
PC Suite used to be the biggest flakiest turd on my PC 5 years ago, and since that time most of the bugs have been ironed out. Why chuck all this out and go back to the drawing board??
Yeah, but who wants it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Symbian must be one of the worst designed OSs in existance
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/6856C375-FE4E-4BC8-B753-B48AF3BD8B30.html [roughlydrafted.com]
Re:Death rattle (Score:1, Interesting)
Primary short-to-medium term competitors for Nokia are Samsung and LG. Apple just can't kill Nokia from the *global* market as long as their phones may cost over ten times more than cheapest Nokia/Samsung model, and two or three times as much as competitors' entry-level smartphones. Apple certainly has a piece of the pie now - but I consider it extremely naïve that their relative market share would just grow linearly.
In long term, Nokia and Samsung are unlikely to grow or shrink dramatically, but what I see for Apple is that they face increasing amount of pressure to maintain their market share. No matter what Apple fans say, global cellular phone market is quite mature, with anomalic exceptions like North America. Eventually Apple becomes mere mortal also on the phone market, as they have become on the computer market. Or does someone in one's right mind sill think they're going to kill HP and Dell by competition? Actually, they're so dependent on iPhone's success that they have drifted into high risk gambling in their game as a result.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Interesting)
Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
It actually comes with a stylus, which is very useful for high precision stuff (e.g. clicking on links in the browser if you can't be bothered zooming in). It also has the advantage of not leaving your screen covered in fingerprints. It's also ideal for handwriting recognition, although the N900 doesn't have that (yet).
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Interesting)
You are vastly underestimating Nokia and Maemo. As another poster has already mentioned, once Nokia moves past their current Symbian (cash cow) vs. Maemo (new kid) stage and puts their full weight behind Maemo, Maemo will become a dominant player in the smartphone market. I have no doubt of this.
Believing that Nokia will not succeed is a very limited US-centric view. True, they are just not as strong a player in the US as in the rest of the world. But, remember that Nokia still has the most market share worldwide, far, far more than Android/Google or Apple today. While certainly the "A" teams are growing, they have a long way to go to even begin to compete with the installed base of Nokia. And consider that innovation from Nokia is starting to pick up steam again, especially in the smartphone market outside the US.
Symbian will be replaced by Maemo in the high end smartphone market. I've owned many Symbian based phones over the years and generally they have worked well, although sometimes the UI has been a little slow. I don't dislike Symbian, but I believe it's nearing the end of it's useful life when considering the possibilities of Linux-based Maemo.