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Mar. 26, 2010

So far this week, there's been a lot of buzz at the CTIA show about Google's Android mobile operating system, but Nokia's David Rivas thinks the buzz is about to shift gears real soon. Or at least he sure wishes it will!

Rivas says that the first mobile handsets using the latest Symbian operating system, called Symbian 3, should hit store shelves around mid-June, early-July.

Rivas is v.p. of technology management at Nokia and he is the company's chief Symbian advisor. He still wouldn't give any details beyond that, including whether or not any of the mobile devices are headed to the U.S.

Rivas also said that the Symbian Foundation, which already owns all the rights to the operating system has plans to have another iteration about every six months, all backwards compatible so that mobile apps will still run on newer handsets as well.

"The consumer really doesn't care what operating system is on the smartphone as long as it works when and where he or she needs it. Google has done a good job promoting Android, but ultimately mobile users want the apps and not the OS," Rivas said.

He added that Nokia has a good developer community and a good platform with Symbian 3 to design for.

Announced in February, Symbian 3 is the first release since the platform became an open source license. It is essentially complete, Rivas said at a briefing, and will be equal to any other OS in the market today.

Overall, wireless users today also want compelling MIDs (mobile Internet devices) and he admitted that Nokia hasn't kept up in that area. But he said that will change with the next phase of Nokia smartphones.

"So far, U.S. wireless operators have been impressed with what the Symbian 3 OS can do. They are looking at it as quite a big step forward. I think the Symbian story is getting much better," said Mark Louison, president of Nokia's North American Wireless Division.

Symbian 3 also has a graphics accelerator for 2D and 3D graphics, HDMI for video to another screen, a music store integration, multi-touch, a customizable home screen and what Rivas calls true multi-tasking capabilities so that 2 applications can run simultaneously.

The touch screen capabilities include pinch-to-zoom gesture support. The home screen supports several pages of 'widgets' and a 'widget manager' to make discovery and download easy, he added.

"Feature for feature, you would be hard-pressed to find anything better in another OS," said Rivas.

Last month, the Symbian Foundation said it is opening its source code to encourage more MID (mobile Internet device) makers to design more devices that incorporate its operating system.

Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of Global Alliances says "opening up the source code also should stimulate Symbian's efforts in North America, a region where the platform has been slower to take off."

He added "making our source code available to the open source community and being more transparent to mobile apps developers is how the Symbian operating system will move forward, and could attract more device makers, including nontraditional handset manufacturers, to choose the platform as they build new wireless products."

The Symbian OS is eleven years old and still leads the mobile operating system market as far as the number of devices using it, with more than 330 million devices running Symbian. But the platform is losing some marketshare and mindshare to OSs from Apple, Google and Research In Motion' Blackberry.

Because of that, Nokia bought out the rest of the Symbian contributors in 2008 and promised to open the platform and formed the Symbian Foundation.

Making the source code available for free could make it more attractive to device makers, especially those in the emerging consumer electronics devices category.

“The mobile apps and OS development community is now empowered to shape the future of the wireless industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result,” said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

“When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we've reached it ahead of schedule,” added Williams.

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Source: Nokia.