Symbian death march
Cellphone maker Sony Ericsson says it will stop making mobile phones that run the Symbian operating system. The move is yet another blow to the struggling Symbian mobile phone operating system which, while still being the largest mobile OS by market share, is losing favour fast.
Sony Ericsson said in a report by the Financial Times over the weekend that it wants to start focusing more on Android-based mobile phones for the future.
Nokia’s Symbian operating system was once the darling of the smartphone world and when the company open sourced the code in 2008 it looked set for even more success. Unfortunately that didn’t happen and what was close to a 50% market share for Symbian a year ago, is now closer to 40%. The major damage to Symbian’s position has been done by the iPhone’s iOS and Google’s Android, which now stand at around 14% and 17% respectively.
With Sony Ericsson now deciding against Symbian, that leaves just one major player shipping devices with the OS: Nokia. Ultimately it could signal the beginning of the end for Symbian.
Applications
Mobile phone developers have all but chosen their platform of choice already. The iPhone market has more than 300 000 applications available, and Android has around 90 000 and growing fast. Symbian simply can’t compete in the market at its current pace.
The Symbian Foundation, which is home to Symbian OS, is moving very slowly with the development of the operating system. Symbian4, the next generation of the OS, is not expected until 2011, and while that promises to be a big upgrade, it will still be very late coming to the party. In the meantime Symbian, which was designed for early smartphones, is now being relegated to low-end devices.
Nokia itself has also scaled down Symbian use. Earlier this year the company said it would stop using Symbian for its high-end phones. In its place Nokia is hoping to use MeeGo, the Linux-based OS created together with Intel.
All told, Symbian looks to be rapidly heading in the wrong direction, leaving in its wake a significant portion of the market for which other players will compete for.
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