https://www.runyourpool.net/

https://www.runyourpool.net/

Summary: When Nokia decided to ditch Symbian back in 2011, it effectively signed the OS’ death warrant. Is history now poised to repeat itself as Nokia squares up to Android in emerging markets?

It may be sliding into obscurity today, but Symbian was for many years in the mid-to-late 2000s a huge success. For most of the last decade, Symbian shifted millions of units (and still does, even now).

And while discussions over Nokia’s OS strategy tend to focus on Lumia shipments, it’s easy to forget how big, and innovative, Symbian once was.

Back in mid-2007, Nokia and Symbian were on top – Symbian had 65 percent of the smartphone market, while one in every two phones sold worldwide carried the Nokia logo. The pairing was a European success story

Symbian was arguably the inventor of the smartphone category.

Today, Android has around three-quarters of the smartphone market, but many of the characteristics that helped make it successful were used by Symbian years before.

Symbian also spotted the importance of touch and large-screen devices, supporting UIs just for such handsets – Series 90 and UIQ for touch (albeit stylus rather than multitouch based), and Series 80 for big-screen handsets. It even picked up on the web browsing trend early, making a WebKit based browser available from 2006 (WebKit is today used by the likes of Apple, as well as Android).

It also used the open source development model that underpins Android

It was a move that made a lot of sense, but one which failed to pay off.

But despite having ideas that were ahead of its time, Symbian failed to benefit from the first mover advantage of any of them.

You don’t use phones to sell ecosystems, you use ecosystems to sell phones. Symbian had always embraced and encouraged third-party developers

However, “as it turns out, after-market software sales for Symbian smartphones remained low”

What aided Apple and hobbled Symbian was the same phenomenon: the app store. Apple made it easier for consumers to buy apps by opening a single storefront, a feat Symbian never managed, although Nokia did open the Ovi store in 2009 to sell Symbian apps – notably behind Apple’s iOS, Android and RIM’s BlackBerry OS, which got their app stores in 2008.

Nigel Clifford, head of Symbian from 2005 to 2008 and now CEO of Procserve, described the lack of a single Symbian app store as one of Symbian’s “fatal fragmentations”. “It was offputting to anyone without the resources to create one of their own – and they are expensive things to develop and maintain,” he said.

there were four different UIs that ran on top of the Symbian OS builds: S60, S80, S90 and UIQ.

“Unfortunately there were three things that really held Symbian back – one, having to charge a licence fee (which we eventually solved); two, not having a unified and complete UI developed with the OS; and three, the fragmented app/ecosystem community,” said Clifford.

“Symbian ran out of steam – it ran out of development potential, particularly as it was geared at that higher end of devices. Symbian was becoming an unmanageable bit of software. It represented challenges in how you could change the user experience.”

“Symbian was limited by its legacy code and its installed based to meet the challenge of more modern APIs and better development tools provided by Apple and Google, which both started with a clean slate.”

When Nokia announced in 2011 that it was ditching Symbian as its primary smartphone platform in favour of Windows Phone, it effectively signalled that the end was nigh for the OS.

Nokia said it would wind down its use of Symbian, and later that year announced that Accenture was to take over development work and support for the OS.

That outsourcing deal will close in 2016, and is unlikely to be renewed.

Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company’s earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: “During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,” the company wrote. “The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.”

“Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed”

This is hardly a surprise, but official confirmation of any kind has been elusive.

The OS made its debut in a commercially available product in 1997, giving it a 15-year run on the market, and it has since powered more than 400 million devices, at a rough estimate

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/19/symbian_maintenance_mode/

Would it surprise you to know that Symbian finished 2011 stronger than it started the year?

Symbian started and finished 2011 as the undisputed king of mobile OSs. Going from 30.25% in January to 33.59% in December, Symbian made a resurgence in the last two months of the year.

Despite great 2011, Symbian’s future is uncertain

It remains to be seen what developments will happen in 2012 but it seems certain that the competition will only increase.

Nokia is ditching its Symbian brand altogether and is renaming its latest version of the Symbian mobile operating system as Nokia Belle.

Nokia is the developer told the meeting in Mexico, the company plans to make the Symbian 3 handsets, at least two updates, identified by the code names are Carla and Donna.

Carla can expect at least the end of next year or the beginning of 2013.

Donna-back version is intended for multi-core processors enabled devices.