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Jan. 4, 2010

Nokia says it is fully committed to the Symbian operating system. Next to the Symbian Foundation itself, no one has been more enthusiastic of the platform than Nokia. The two have become synonymous since Nokia spent $392 million of its money to dictate the operating system’s standards body.

The Symbian OS is found on all of Nokia’s smartphones and even some of its feature phones. “A substantial amount of our product line is based on Symbian,” says David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president of technology management.

Overall, Rivas handled the operational aspects of acquiring the IP (intellectual property) behind the Symbian OS and also led the effort to create the Symbian Foundation.

Nokia is solidly affiliated with Symbian despite occasional flirtations with Maemo. The company says it will only be releasing one Maemo-based device over the next year and recently announced a planned overhaul of the Symbian user interface.

Maemo is an open source community developing software around the Maemo platform. The Maemo community has about 22,460 registered members that contribute to more than 900 community development projects in the Maemo Garage. Maemo is a software platform that is mostly based on open source code and powers mobile devices such as the Nokia N-810 Internet Tablet.

“Overall, Nokia says it will continue to use Symbian in a great volume of their phones, but if they have any hope of creating smartphones that meet expectations of how a phone should look and operate, that operating system of choice may just be Maemo,” says ABI Research analyst Kevin Burden.

Burden argues that Nokia’s Symbian legacy is also holding it back from developing cutting-edge MIDs (mobile Internet devices) capable of competing against the likes of Android. “Their first mover advantage was great for the first few years, but it’s difficult to take an operating system like that and revamp it to new looks and new styles of innovation,” Burden added.

“We’re also building good devices based on Symbian, and the technology in Maemo and Symbian devices is roughly compatible,” Burden says. “We are 100 percent committed to Symbian in the future.”

Symbian-based handsets comprise the vast majority of open-source handset shipments. According to Juniper Research, overall shipments of open source wireless handsets are expected to hit 106 million in 2010, 87 million of which will be based on the Symbian operating system.

Juniper expects Symbian handsets will comprise over 80 percent of the open-source market in less than five years from now, with about 180 million shipments in total.

The Symbian operating system must support a huge range of capabilities at various price points. In essence, it has to be everything to everyone. It can’t be specialized for the needs of high-end smartphones without a detrimental effect on lower-end models, effectively limiting its development.

On the other hand, Maemo has no such overhead. Maemo was developed for Nokia’s Internet tablets back in 2005.

The Linux-based operating system is optimized for the computing used on mobile Internet devices, making it ideal for handling the increasingly complex capabilities of today's modern smartphones.

Maemo is also open source, an app development advantage it shares with both Android and Symbian.

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Source: Nokia.