There are only a handful of legitimate smartphone operating system contenders on the world stage: RIM with the Blackberry, Nokia with its Symbian, Apple with the iPhone, and Palm with its Pre, Microsoft with Windows Mobile, and Google with Android, as major examples. And, unlike mobile handsets, which declined to 286M units (down 6.1% from a year earlier) in Q2 2009, smartphone sales were up by 27% Quarter over Quarter to 41M units (based on a recent report issued by Gartner). Nokia has been losing smartphone market share to Apple, RIM and Google.
So, any major software or architecture changes among Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, Palm, Google are going to be worth noting.
According to anonymous sources at Nokia, as reported by the Financial Times of Germany, Nokia, which paid €264M (~$400M) for Symbian just 4 months ago, will now outfit many if not all of its smartphones with a primarily open-source OS called Maemo that it currently uses in its Internet tablets. Mind you, as TechCrunch notes, Nokia has spent billions ($8 BILLION for Navteq alone) over the last 4 years and very little of it has been productively integrated or used, so €264M for Symbian isn’t so bad.
FTD quotes a source close to Nokia saying: “Symbian is much too cumbersome to keep up with modern operating systems. We have to react.” Symbian supposedly has 20,000,000 lines of code and is way too unwieldy in a fast-paced environment where Nokia has to imitate Apple more rapidly than its current architecture allows (hence the lag time in copying the touchscreen-based iPhone).
Couple the Maemo / Nokia smartphone news with the recent announcement (as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal) with Microsoft that the companies will develop a mobile version of Microsoft’s Office suite of software that works on Nokia cellphones, and it’s looking pretty grim for good ole Symbian…
Editor’s Note: GigaOm has an article with additional market share information for Microsoft, Nokia, Apple and others.
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