What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives?
Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially partly because of that.
If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback).
Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are successfully using?
There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian?
The explanation is right there in your first sentence -- "high-end". Symbian can work with 1/10th of the CPU and 1/20th of the RAM compared to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform.
It will be a long time before all phones can be equipped with ARM Cortex CPUs and 256 MB RAM. In the meantime, there will be literally billions of phones sold with much lesser specs. It makes a lot of sense for Symbian to target that market.
(It's curious that Nokia gets so much flack for using multiple operating systems, when other vendors don't have a single OS that would span their whole range either... The existence of Mac OS X doesn't imply that iPhone OS is too limited. Windows Mobile isn't suffering because Windows 7 is so much better. Google has both Android and Chrome OS, etc. Different devices, different users, different operating systems.)
Symbian phones are fairly capable (just look at what many of the high end nokias have been able to do for years); just generally not as "polished" as an iPhone/Android device.
> There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
Maybe we'll get some answers now that the source is out there. I think that part of the problem is that Nokia is just confused, and spread a bit thin, in terms of handling everything from 25 euro phones to the high end Linux ones.
Comments
What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives?
Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially partly because of that.
If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback).
Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are successfully using?
There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian?
The explanation is right there in your first sentence -- "high-end". Symbian can work with 1/10th of the CPU and 1/20th of the RAM compared to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform.
It will be a long time before all phones can be equipped with ARM Cortex CPUs and 256 MB RAM. In the meantime, there will be literally billions of phones sold with much lesser specs. It makes a lot of sense for Symbian to target that market.
(It's curious that Nokia gets so much flack for using multiple operating systems, when other vendors don't have a single OS that would span their whole range either... The existence of Mac OS X doesn't imply that iPhone OS is too limited. Windows Mobile isn't suffering because Windows 7 is so much better. Google has both Android and Chrome OS, etc. Different devices, different users, different operating systems.)
Symbian phones are fairly capable (just look at what many of the high end nokias have been able to do for years); just generally not as "polished" as an iPhone/Android device.
> There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.
Maybe we'll get some answers now that the source is out there. I think that part of the problem is that Nokia is just confused, and spread a bit thin, in terms of handling everything from 25 euro phones to the high end Linux ones.