Published on Christmas Eve by Symbian Foundation Executive Director Lee Williams, there's an interesting article here detailing his thoughts on Symbian's role in the industry in 2010 and beyond. I've also quoted a few paragraphs below, with comment.

"Symbian’s value in the future mobile market is its incredible flexibility, robustness and adaptability to future needs. We enjoy better multitasking capability, better power management, security, and scale of market than any mobile platform out there. It is clear that we have a unique offering, and an OS architected for mobile from day 1, and poised to continue to appeal to the marketplace at a tremendous scale."

Well said. It's clear that parts of Symbian's OS and UI are undergoing a metamorphosis, but its underlying technology and focus remains the reason why Symbian still has my attention umpteen years on. Getting the absolute most from a few millamp hours of battery life is still a strength of this OS.

"Nokia’s endorsement of Symbian specifically marks out our future as a mobile computing and communications platform for the masses, globally marketed in smartphones costing $150 and under, and being an essential ingredient for helping others embrace the power of new types of communication."

This is a significant market shift. $150 is about £100 and Lee's talking about "smartphones" "under" this threshold. I've grown up with smartphones traditionally costing £300 upwards, SIM-free, and often £400+. Taking Symbian's smartphone OS below £100 is huge, potentially reaching three or four times the normal smartphone market. I don't think those global Canalys/Gartner marketshare figures (currently about 50%) are going to tail off, as some have predicted. It's entirely possible that Symbian's global smartphone marketshare will just keep growing.

"From 2010 onwards Symbian powered smartphones will continue to bring the web to people who cannot afford a PC and who need to be on the move as a part of their lifestyle, perhaps because they might be farmers in a rural area of the India sub-continent, or small business owners in a remote area of China. We will be directly assisting them in linking them into a global economy, and we will be giving them computing power and access to essential applications and services in finance, payments, healthcare, transport, entertainment…and so on."

And here too is a key to Symbian's growth, helping manufacturers push into areas other than the high profile USA and European 'price is no object' smartphone ecosystem.

You'll find more in Symbian's full blog post, it makes for an interesting read!