While everything is nice and happy in the partnership in Symbian, there's alway rumblings about Nokia's influence. It's not as if they would ever leave... But Ewan has taken at look at some of the coding mantra inside Symbian OS, and speculates that Symbian could well have coded a trap door for any partners looking to bale out. Read on...

Isn’t Series 60 wonderful. Isn’t it great how there’s almost no reference to Symbian OS inside the operating system? After all, you call up programs through a program called the system screen, which just displays a number of icons. There are a number of applications out there that let you change the look and feel of your device to something more suited to your lifestyle. These could be simple ‘themes’ or full blown replacement interfaces.

But the underlying thing here is that the actual operating system (Symbian OS) is as divorced from the user interface as possible. Now this is by design, Symbian stress this at every opportunity to its developers – make sure the stuff that handles the screen and inputs is in a separate module to the bit of code that does the stuff, it’ll make porting easier. Which is harder to code in the first place, but gives you a huge number of benefits later on when you need to release 40 different versions to cover all the bases.

But that’s not what this is about, I’m looking at the actual handsets. Quick question, do you have a Symbian handset or a Series 60 (UIQ/S80/Foma) handset? I suspect 80% or more of the 25 million handsets users out there would reply with the name of the User Interface rather than the Operating System – because as far as they are concerned, that is what runs their phone. They’re not bothered about the intricacies of the version numbers, that it’s a consortium of companies who put together another company (Symbian) to write the really low-level stuff. No they just want something that works.

Recently announced numbers from Symbian point out that the average revenue per handset they receive has dropped from $6.70 in Q4 2003 to $5.70 in Q4 2004 (why they thought the US Dollar was a sensible thing to use as a base currency for a mainly European based consortium is another matter altogether). Now that number probably reflects a mix of volume discount along with the handset manufacturers needing less technical support for the handsets, but it also points out something else. Symbian OS could rapidly become a commodity – something that’s needed for every phone, but something that is available from anywhere.

Replacing the OS with another flavour isn’t without it’s problems – look at the fun PalmSource is having convincing the world Linux is their way forward (but don’t forget when Palm switched from Dragonball processors to ARM they effectively had to do a ground-up rewrite) so it is possible with planning.

And it’s not as if Nokia haven’t dumped an OS writer in a flagship smartphone and went their own way before. If you sit a Nokia 9210 Communicator next to a Nokia 9110, you won’t see a huge amount of difference either in the styling of the device, or in the layout and operation of the applications (beyond the fact the 9110 was a greyscale device). But there is one major difference. The 9210 runs with Symbian OS, and the 9110 uses GeOS. Did the end user care? Certainly not the existing Communicator users, and the Symbian (then EPOC OS) users were more than happy to see Nokia pick up where Psion left off.

Just don’t mention what happened to GeOS too loudly inside Symbian. Because for all the “keep everything separate” in the code mantra, if it was truly separate, there’d be nothing to stop Nokia swanning off like a Finnish version of Christopher Eccleston. And where would that leave Symbian?