As part of the Symbian Foundation's transition to a licensing only organisation the majority of the Symbian Foundation websites closed today. Together with the departure of the majority of the remaining staff, today marks the end of major operations by the Symbian Foundation. Of course, the Symbian platform will continue under the guidance of Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative 'direct and open model'. Some comments below.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
Well worth bookmarking for late evening reading over a beer or two is Andrew Orlowski's epic two part essay on the history of Symbian from creation in 1998 up to near the present day. Interviewing a number of past employees, admittedly, there's a strong aftertaste of 'these are all the bits that went wrong' and there's little in the way of acknowledgement of success stories, but Orlowski's text is readable and well researched. Here's part one: Dark Star, covering Symbian's creation and here's part two: The battle for Symbian's soul.
Following the news that it would now become a licensing body, the Symbian Foundation has announced that all of its websites will close down on December 17th 2010. After that date, every site under the symbian.org domain, including developer.symbian.org, horizon.symbian.org, ideas.symbian.org and blog.symbian.org, will no longer be online. In addition, it has been said that the Twitter and Facebook accounts for the Symbian Foundation "are also likely to be discontinued". Read on for further details and ramifications.
Nokia has announced it has appointed Jerri DeVard as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. A new Marketing and Communication organisation will be formed under the CMO, which will bring together Nokia's Marketing, Brand Management, Communications and select Industry collaboration activities. DeVard will sit on the Nokia Group Executive Board, underlining the seniority and importance of her position, but will report to Niklas Savander, EVP of Nokia's Markets unit.
Limited Q3, 2010 worldwide smartphone platform sales figures are now available, published by Gartner here. Year on year, Symbian-powered smartphone sales are up over 50%, but it's still a sharply rising market and Android's explosion into second place means that Symbian now has a very serious competitor, in addition to being 'down' to 36.6% world marketshare. With Android on the march, iPhone marketshare was also down year on year, ditto RIM and Windows Mobile. See below for some comments and the stats.
In a conference call this afternoon, Nokia and the Symbian Foundation outlined some major changes in how the Symbian operating system will be managed, going forwards. The Symbian Foundation will still handle licensing, trademark and patent issues, among other tasks, but all governance of the open source Symbian codebase will be taken up by Nokia. It was remarked that the 'foundation' model made perfect sense when there were five companies depending on the OS, but that it made less sense now, in late 2010.
A hugely entertaining read by Tim Ocock (formerly of Symbian) over on Tech Crunch Europe this morning. Ocock’s well placed to comment on “The Successful Failures” of Symbian, as he straddled engineering and management during his time at the company. Starting at the birth of Symbian, right through to his current advice to Nokia and the Symbian Foundation (ditch S40, support your developers with useful API’s and tools, and spend time educating the market and the Analysts), this is one to read over lunch."
SYMBEOSE, a consortium of organisations, led by the Symbian Foundation, has successfully applied for funding from the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, which is partly backed by the Europe Commission and aims to facilitate public-private partnership for research and development activities in embedded systems. As a result, the Symbian ecosystem will see an investment of €22 million, which will be focused on improving the ease of device creation, improving a number of the platform's core enablers and meeting requirements for future embedded systems.
The cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I have to hand it to Horace Dediu at Asymco. His graph of "sales vs profit per handset" not only shows how profitable some of the major manufacturers are, but also how Apple and Nokia are working completely different strategies in sales.
While it’s not the Q3 smartphones table, the latest numbers from IDC on global phone shipments make for interesting reading. As always, the devil is in the detail and you can argue this is good (or bad) news for any company, but Apple displacing Sony Ericsson will be a cause for celebration at Cupertino, especially as this is the first Top 5 table Sony Ericsson has not been in since this report started in 2004. Nokia is still on top of the pile with 32.4% market share on increased shipments of 1.8%, worldwide.
Possibly of most interest to developers and those 'in' the industry, I wanted to flag up that, despite all recent announcements and speculation, The Symbian Foundation's SEE 2010 event takes place on the 9th and 10th of November at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, billed as "the only event dedicated to bringing the Symbian community together and providing unique knowledge and insight from industry experts". Attendance is free to all, as usual. Some more details below.
Nokia today made an announcement that clarifies and simplifies its developer and software platform strategy. Nokia will focus on Qt as the sole application development framework across both MeeGo and Symbian, reinforcing and accelerating Nokia's previous commitment to it. Nokia will also develop its own future UI applications using Qt.
The planned and future development of the higher layers of Symbian OS itself will also rely heavily on Qt; Nokia says this will "allow a continuous improvement of the Symbian experience" and, critically, will be compatible with the existing Symbian^3 platform and devices. This will mean that existing Symbian^3 devices will be included in future updates and will receive many of the user experience and application improvements originally planned for Symbian^4. Going forward, Nokia will simply refer to the platform as 'Symbian', without any version specifics.
Nokia has released their Q3 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €529 million, with net sales of €10.3 billion. Nokia's device and service division's profits were €807 million, up 3% year on year. Margins in devices and services were 10.5% (down 0.9% YoY and up 0.9% QoQ). The figures beat market expectations. Converged devices sales (smartphones) were significantly up, at 26.5 million, compared with 16.4 million units in Q3 2009 (up 61% YoY) and compared with 24 million units in Q2 2010 (up 10%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 38%, down 3% sequentially but up 2% year on year.
The Symbian Foundation has announced that Lee Williams has stepped down, for personal reasons, from his role of Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. He is to be replaced by Tim Holbrow with immediate effect. Holbrow is a member of the Symbian Leadership Team and was previously responsible for Operations (covering Finance, IT, Infrastructure and property services) at the Foundation.
