Symbian OS is one of the biggest smartphone operating systems by market share and the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation, and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device.
How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts, and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.
To this day, Symbian OS benefits from better battery life and lower hardware requirements than its competitors with similar features. Symbian is, arguably, the best phone Operating System there has ever been, and the original standard bearer for the smartphone concept.
But it’s no longer competing to be the best phone OS, or the best smartphone OS — it’s competing to be the best OS for internet phones. When Apple launches a new product, it might look like something you’ve seen before. But they define totally new categories; it just takes a while for everyone else to realise.
Call it a superphone or an internet phone, the only platform that actually comes close to offering the same experience as iPhone is Android.
Internet phones include better web browsing, better multimedia, and apps of all shapes and sizes (and by implication, ease for developers to make those apps), as well as a better UI to make all that content accessible, even at the expense of traditional phone features. They are something different from smartphones.
Symbian OS has never been an OS for internet phones. The Symbian definition of a smartphone was a phone with PDA functions. The browser was always a second-class citizen, a third-party component – Opera by default in the early days, but freely replaced with a licensee’s preferred option.
Perhaps where Symbian started slipping in quality was the need, caused by the appearance of iPhone, to compete in the internet phone space too — a space Symbian OS thought it was in and thought it was winning, without realising iPhone was something altogether different.
With neither enough time nor talent to make a competitive internet phone, that was enough of a distraction to let even those things that Symbian did well, slip too.
And things do take a long time when it comes to Symbian. Long before it was made open source, the platform had a well-earned reputation for being hard to program.
With its origins in Psion’s EPOC PDA Operating System, its peculiar form of C++ predated the ANSI standards of 1998, and in any case STL, ANSI exceptions, and other features of the language in their semi-official forms were not conducive to writing lean software for battery-powered PDAs.
In their place, constructs such as the notorious Descriptor (like a string, but less useful) and the egregious chore of managing the memory cleanup stack caused much frustration for newcomers to the platform, and Symbian’s code verbosity.
Yet the difficulty of writing good Symbian code hugely benefited Symbian OS as a business in the early days. For many years, 80% of Symbian’s revenues were earned through consulting for licensees…
however, is the right strategy for the application suite and for third-party developers — it just needs to be finished, and soon! It needs to be core to the Nokia software operation, not a fringe activity.
Analysts are starting to understand that Symbian OS is a platform only for phones, not for internet phones. Nokia needs to continue to educate the market to remove the risk of perception becoming fact. If they do not, they remain a company with tremendous assets but depressed market cap based almost purely on perception, and therefore a prime takeover target.
The problem for Symbian itself is that Nokia already has another phone OS, the increasingly creaky NOS/S40. The indirect costs of maintaining two ‘low-end’ platforms easily outweigh a couple of dollars on the BOM for the ever-so-slightly lower hardware requirements of S40 — and that difference is only going to get slimmer.
Nokia needs to ditch S40 now even though that seems like short-term suicide when it’s propping up the market share.
But 38% market share is not worth having if that’s the 38% of the market who buy phones which only have a 1% profit margin.
The lesson for Meego, and other pretenders to the crown, is perhaps to look after your developers with useful APIs and powerful tools both inside and outside of your organisation. Find the right balance between efficiency and ease of development. Look after all of your developers — and your developers will look after you.
