Nokia has today announced that they will be acquiring the remaining 52% of Symbian they don’t own and will be releasing the complete Symbian platform under the Eclipse open source license. Nokia have also announced the creation of the Symbian Foundation, which is an alliance of mobile vendors and application providers that any company can join. The foundation will oversee the process of releasing Symbian under a new open source license, and then retain the long-term control and trademarks of the operating system.
Symbian is a mobile operating system that runs primarily on the ARM architecture used in Nokia, Sony Erricsson and Samsung devices. Symbian originated at Psion, and found its way onto Nokia handsets starting with the original Communicator. Symbian found a good home at Nokia, and its growth as a mobile platform grew as Nokia dominated the mobile handset market from 2000 onwards.
Current mobile handset market share statistics depend very largly on who you ask and which classification is used, but the ranking is currently approximately:
- Symbian (60%)
- Windows (15%)
- RIM (10%)
- iPhone (7%)
The Sybmian market share can be further broken down as not all versions are compatible with others. Regardless of the source of data, Symbian is by far the dominant smartphone operating system.
With such dominant market share, the question to ask is why Nokia would pour more money into Symbian to only then open source the platform. As the Symbian foundation says, the purpose of Symbian is to: “bring to life a shared vision and to create the most proven, open and complete mobile software platform - available for free”. Sound familiar?
I have both techcrunch and techcrunchIT added to my RSS, is there a need to repeat the stories?
raul: we are working out the details on how it will work so that it only pops up in a single feed
Can you please create a favicon for this nice blog so my favorites list doesn’t look so bland?
Shimon: will do that also :)
Yes, I assume it has something to do with Google Android. Or indeed securing it’s future against perhaps current stronger new players like the iPhone. And a full stack of software and web (social and mapping) that add up to a very powerful combination for Nokia, through other recent purchases. Seems a very clear confident strategy.
And from my own slightly vested interest, as Nokia/Symbian has signalled that Microsoft Silverlight could come to their platform soon, I’m glad that they are still very committed to their own OS.
[...] to TechCrunch IT, the approximate shares of all operating systems are: Symbian with 60%, Windows Mobile with 15%, [...]
I find it hard to believe the iphone has 7% of the market already? is this US figures or world wide? also what are the sources for those figures? are they just smart phone figures because I would imagine there are a lot of nokia handsets out there that are not smart phones as such and have this os.
I
[...] Via: TechCrunchIT [...]
This looks like a great strategic move by Nokia, especially if they already have 60% market share. Whoever owns the biggest platform will get the biggest bite at global handset access and income and, more importantly, mobile advertising revenues. Here is a very recent New Yorker interview with Eric Schmidt on Google, including very interesting comments about what Google thinks about where the mobile internet is going:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/06/16/080616_auletta
[...] cool factor and the BlackBerry’s popularity in the corporate market, Symbian is still by far the biggest mobile player. It would be unwise to count the company out as a competitive threat [...]
iron의 생각…
Symbian Goes Open Source - Courtesy of Nokia…
Regarding the market share figures above, I assume you meant market share for smart phones, not all phones. Symbian isn’t on 60% of the world’s handsets, or even 60% of all of Nokia’s handsets for that matter.
Nokia’s global market share is about 39%. Interesting move.
The market share numbers are completely inaccurate. These reflect Smartphone market share, not mobile market share. There are 1.2bn phones sold every year and only 200-300m can claim to be smartphones so this paints a completely false picture.
iPhone has approx 0.7% market share right now.
Nokia has approx 40% but the vast bulk of those are Series40 handsets, not using symbian.
All that said, the point of this exercise is to crush Android
[...] que tras la compra pasó a ser Open Source bajo una licencia Eclipse. Afirmate, Android. (vía) [...]
[...] TechCrunchIT « Veramente possiamo parlare di fine delle teorie [...]
[...] has about a 60-65% market share. Windows has 15%, Research in Motion has 10% and the iPhone has 7%, according to TechCrunch. RIM shares are down nearly 2% this morning to $140.24, and Apple shares are pretty much unchanged [...]
[...] 我們都知道，Symbian是這十年來，全世界市場佔有率最高手機OS（根據TechCrunch的說法，Symbian市佔率現為六成），Nokia及SE的手機都是用Symbian。所以Nokia是想效法M$，變成無線裝置領域上的OS霸王嗎？ [...]
[...] Um das in Kontext zu bringen hier die derzeitige Aufteilung im Smartphone Mark (Quelle: TechCrunch IT [...]
[...] share. Microsoft’s Windows has 15%, Research in Motion has 10% and the Apple iPhone has 7%, according to TechCrunch. RIM shares are down more than 1% this morning to $141.09, and Apple shares are up nearly 1% to [...]
[...] TechCrunch IT are reporting that Nokia has bought Symbian Ltd, the software development company famous for creating the proprietary operating system for mobile devices, Symbian OS. [...]
Its too bad the license they used is incompatible with the GPL 3. Linux and other GPL’d software still can’t incorporate their code.
” This is a free software license. Unfortunately, it has a choice of law clause which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL.”
[...] techcrunchit [...]
Good point Max - I started reading the Eclipse license because I don’t know much about it, and I figured there must be some reason why they chose it over the simpler licenses and those used more often (gpl, bsd, mozilla)
[...] the past 10 years. The numbers vary widely depending on where you look, but as TechCrunchIT points out, Symbian currently carries roughly 60% of smartphone market share [...]
[...] Parece que los finlandeses andan con la billetera gordita: ahora compraron el 52% de participación restante — que estaba en manos de Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic y Samsung — y son los únicos y felices dueños de Symbian OS. Pero eso no es todo: Hoy se lanzó la Fundación Symbian, con la intención de masificar y unificar las variantes del sistema operativo, que tras la compra pasó a ser Open Source bajo una licencia Eclipse. Afirmate, Android. (vía) [...]
[...] TechCrunchIT Tags: celulares, iPhone, mobil, Nokia, Symbian, Symbian OSPosted in gadgets, geek, internet, [...]
[...] [原文へ、全文（TechcrunchIT.com）へ] [...]
Does this *really* mean that the *entire* Symbian platform will be open sourced? All the press release really says is:
[...] Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. [...]
So initally only “selected components” will be open sourced. Even after two years it only says “the most complete mobile software offering available in open source” which isn’t saying that it will actually be complete like Linux is complete, but only that it will be *more* complete compared to the competition.
This is also entirely separate from S60, right? Which means that all the UI goodies won’t be open sourced. So that’s kinda different from Android which actually provides a usable UI.
Or am I missing something?
[...] Parece que los finlandeses andan con la billetera gordita: ahora compraron el 52% de participación restante — que estaba en manos de Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic y Samsung — y son los únicos y felices dueños de Symbian OS. Pero eso no es todo: Hoy se lanzó la Fundación Symbian, con la intención de masificar y unificar las variantes del sistema operativo, que tras la compra pasó a ser Open Source bajo una licencia Eclipse. Afirmate, Android. (vía) [...]
[...] Nokia achiziţionează Symbian şi vor să-l relanseze open-source; probabil va rivaliza cu Google [...]
[...] Fonte dati: TechCrunchIT [...]
[...] - Symbian Foundation, TechCrunch IT และบล็อกนัน แปลภาษา [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] Symbian Goes Open Source - Courtesy of Nokia Tagged with: موبایل, متن باز, نوکیا, سیمبین « مشي امام حسين در ميان ائمه شيعه يك استثنا بود و نه يك قاعده! [...]
[...] Symbian -当前，Symbian没有开源，Nokia的最近公告，Symbian即将开源。 [...]
[...] 60 percent of the mobile market, Symbian has long been the dominant mobile OS. While Nokia has recently been dabbling with Linux, [...]
[...] Continue reading on TechcrunchIT.com >> [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] But while Android may be one focus, it’s not likely that it’s the sole target of Nokia’s efforts here. Consider the marketshare statistics cited by TechCrunch: [...]
[...] the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average [...]
[...] Mobile. Apple’s iPhone has certainly turned up the heat in percentage of Web clicks relative to Smartphone market share, but Microsoft enjoys a big lead in the power and sophistication of its developer tools. Blending [...]
[...] 根據這個網站，以下是各個手機作業系統的市場佔有率： [...]
[...] Manager-Magazin.de, Techcrunchit.com, [...]
The smartphone OS market will be divided into two groups: Proprietry and Open. Proprietry group includes Microsoft and Apple, tradiotionally a software company. Their business model will be destroyed if they sell software for free and they are basically unable to take open approach. Open group includes Nokia and Google. Both have nothing to lose to sell software for free but see opportnities in universal service on the platform. Nokia’s move seeems to tell that the proprietry OS will see more pressure from open source, just like in PC. Strategically, this is very interesting move, but it seems to be too early to tell who will be the winner in mobile internet space. But at least I feel we will see more diversification/fragmentation of the market rather than concentration in the future.
[...] commentators, such as TechCrunchIT, think this is a good move by Nokia. Om Malik has a good analysis of the likely background [...]
[...] Encontré esta noticia en Techcrunchit. [...]