Symbian on Life Support - What lead to this?

Symbian is an open source OS and the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use. According to Gartner, in 2010 Symbian is the best-selling smartphone system with 37.6% share overall as almost all the leading manufacturers also use it on their devices. But in Q4 2010 handsets with Google’s Android software overtook sales of Symbian smartphones. The Symbian platform designed for smartphones is the successor to Symbian OS and was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., including Symbian OS assets at its core, the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces. In December 2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS and announced a community led by the Symbian Foundation will develop it, which officially launched in April 2009. Recently Nokia announced that it would migrate away from Symbian to Windows Phone 7.

Symbian was more designed to work on phones and PDAs and finds its origins in Psion’s EPOC PDA Operating System but not on smartphones. Another critical issue was Symbian needed an additional user interface system. Developers complained about the difficulty in programming, the code was closely guarded and only Symbian internal developers can develop and 80% of revenues were earned through consulting for licensees. Licensees like Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, and Sony Ericsson also encouraged delivering half engineered product so that they can add their own flavors and differentiating from one another. This led to three incompatible and diverging OSs: NTT DoCoMo's Symbian MOAP for Asia, Nokia’s Symbian S60, and Sony Ericsson’s Symbian UIQ. Other technical issues include design issues like C++ development, no support for proper string handling, not a great support for multi threading, bad development environment and lack of proper documentation and resources.

Nokia played a critical role not only in the rise of Symbian but also in its fall. Nokia was vey actively involved as it sold the most number of devices using Symbian OS. Nokia influenced Symbian decisions and always blocked Symbian from developing the OS and also forced Symbian to adopt Nokia controlled components. Even after acquiring Symbian Nokia did not support the foundation in terms of human resources and technology support. More over Nokia maintained its own internal line of Symbian developers working on its own version of code, developed its own version of OS NOS/S40 and it tied up with Intel to offer a new OS MeeGo. As a matter of fact Nokia and its business strategy played a crucial role in ruining the Symbian OS. Now it made a very questionable decision to go with Microsoft Windows Phone and develop apps.

Does this mean it’s an end for Symbian? The fact is all the mobile phones in the world are not going to be smartphones with big computing powers. High end smartphones are more like mobile computing devices with a phone app for calls. There will be always mid and low range segments in mobile devices where Symbian does work well but User Interface has to be improved. Nokia and other Industry peers along with developers community has to make sure that people understand the true capability of Symbian is not to work on High end smartphones but focus on its core capabilities of good battery life and lower hardware requirements.

Nokia and other OEMs are still developing handsets that need Symbian OS and there is huge cumulative base of more than 300 million handsets already there in the market and Symbian Foundation is itself focusing on improving the technical capabilities of the code convenient to work on the modern day touch devices. All these factors highlight  Symbian will be surviving for some more time but soon will be dethroned by Google’s Android as the largest smartphone OS. Android is seeing a huge rise in its share as OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc are releasing significant number of handsets into the market.

Discussion points:

1. What should be the Symbian future course of action?
2. Should Symbian try to compete with iOS, Android and Windows Phone immediately or delay and focus on the mid segment phones?
3. What should Symbian Foundation do to attract developers?
4. How to attract the OEMs back to Symbian OS?