The Symbian OS is largely a mystery to readers of the Let's Talk blog, since we are mostly US-based. Our Smartphone familiarity is with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry OS devices. But while we've been tapping away on our Treos, Tilts, and Pearls, the rest of the world has been witnessing the steady progress of Symbian.

The story of Symbian actually runs deeper than the ten years it has been called Symbian. In 1980, a company called Psion began making desktop productivity software for PCs. By 1984, the company launched its first handheld computer or PDA. By the late 80s, Psion had built the EPOC OS to run their PDAs. Through the years, Psion offered a number of full-featured handheld computers, leading to the 1994-97 creation of the 32-bit EPOC OS.

Around the same time as the modernized EPOC OS was ready, other PDAs were hitting the market, such as the popular PalmPilot from inventors Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. The first Windows PocketPC devices were also coming out from Compaq and Dell. The writing was on the wall that these powerful PDA OSes would someday all be integrated into devices with radios (or radios integrated into these PDAs, if you wish). The European mobile handset (Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens) crowd were prescient in spotting this trend, and realized that they did not like the PC market case study wherein the hardware was commoditized, and the OS layer (Windows) ended up capturing all the profits. They feared a repeat with their hardware and mobile Windows OSes, or Palm, or whatever.

Instead of becoming the next Compaq, Gateway or Dell, led by Nokia, their strategy would be to mutually embrace one mobile OS, to make sure it had scale, and to make sure it was not dominated by one player, or even worse, Redmond. Thus, in 1998, a consortium including Siemens, Motorola, Ericsson, Psion, and eventually Panasonic and Samsung bought Symbian and spun it out from Psion.

Thus, the goal for Symbian was to be the dominant smartphone OS in the world, to provide a reliable alternative to MSFT or other OSes, and to offer low, reasonable licensing costs that wouldn't squeeze the hardware vendors out of the profit equation. And by every indication (despite the obscurity here in the US), Symbian has succeeded: In 2007, Symbian had 67% of the smartphone market by shipping volume, compared to MSFT's 13% and RIM's 10%.

So what can I tell you that's interesting about the Symbian OS. Let me go to a bullet list to make this concise:

• It was designed from the ground up to be used on small devices with limited resources. It is robust, seldom crashes, cleans up unused memory, and stresses reduced power use.
• Runs on ARM processors, where one processor chipset can drive all smartphone and radio tasks.
• Provides a Java VM environment
• The OS is standardized, but the UI layer is intended to be designed by the handset vendor to allow product differentiation.
• With its flexible UI layer, Symbian appears on many phones that you might not think of as "smart". Many phones without extra large screens or keyboards still run Symbian.

I actually had the first Symbian phone released to market, an R380 from Ericsson. It was a very cool device at the time, with a monochrome screen that was partially covered by the keypad. Flip the keypad down to expose even more screen, bigger than anything else in its day. There were a number of applications built-in, but to be honest, the whole thing was a little glitchy. I still used a Palm Vii as my main PDA. One of the main problems was that connectivity was still through dial-up Circuit-Switched Packet Data, so the integration of PDA with cellular network was weak. I think I still have this phone in a box somewhere, since it failed to sell on eBay...

My latest Symbian phone, a 2007 Nokia N95 is a very different experience than my R380. This device is a powerhouse smartphone with media, camera, video, 3G networking, Wi-Fi, PIM, down-loadable apps, bluetooth accessories, and a bright colorful screen. The N95 truly is a handheld computer, and to Symbian's credit is rock solid, and quite responsive. Can't remember ever having to "reboot". But the UI (or I should say UIs, since it seems to have two) is confusing, and the lack of touch-screen interface is a negative.

The handset vendors all treat their Symbian partnership differently. Support from Nokia has been unwavering, although they recently bought Trolltech, a Linux OS vendor. The other minority owners in the consortium are less religiously dedicated to Symbian. Motorola seems to support any mobile OS that is well-known, and seems keen on Linux. Ericsson (now Sony-Ericsson) has wavered back and forth on the strength of their commitment to Symbian. There seems to be a little rift in the group that Nokia is too much in control.

But the original 1998 motivator for Symbian's existence - a vendor-owned OS to compete with MSFT - is very much still in effect, if not more so. The Windows Mobile platforms have moved (excruciatingly slowly) towards offering a stable, robust alternative, but in true MSFT fashion, you can never write them off. The main threat that I see to Symbian's existence would be the possible success of Android. Although hardly a foregone conclusion, Android as promised would obviate the need for Symbian as an open, cheaply licensed, fully functional Smartphone OS. If Android is massively successful, it would not "beat" Symbian so much as make Symbian redundant.

Yet let's not get ahead of ourselves: it will take more than spin to knock Symbian out. Android is currently a batch of promises, where Symbian had delivered on its promises. Android currently ships 0 units, Linux variants are still a tiny fraction stalled by variation in implementations, MSFT has quality and control issues, Blackberry is a one-vendor OS, and Palm... Meanwhile, according to ABI Research:

• "77.3 million Symbian smartphones were shipped in 2007, 50% more than the 51.7 million shipped in 2006"
• Symbian has 67% of the smartphone market - no small potatoes
• This year's MWC cellular confab showed 4 new Nokias, one new LG, and one new Samsung Symbian phone
• "Symbian’s share of the overall handset market grew from about 5.1% in 2006 to 6.7% in 2007"
• 10% of handsets shipped in 2007 were smartphones, compared to a projected 25% in 2012

And Symbian doesn't need to maintain 67% market share to meet its goals. The main goal is to avoid a third party company from gaining a monopoly on the mobile OS business. So long as there is choice and competition in the marketplace, that goal is assured.

The bottom line is that, even though we in the US don't know it well, Symbian is here to stay. And as more handset vendors sell directly to customers, and as Nokia continues to invest in penetrating the US market, we should expect to become more intimately connected to Symbian in the middle term.

Android Vs. Symbian

Symbian is an established mobile OS with around 70% market share in the smart phone OS market. Android has just been started and the first device will be coming at the end of 2008. Symbian is partially open and is backed by a huge developer community and the number mobile handset OEM, Nokia. Android is full open, has a developer base and is backed by the Open Handset Alliance. The main drawback of the OHA is that it comprises players with different and conflicting business models, which might have a negative impact on Android. Also, Google backs Android. Symbian has always portrayed itself as a serious mobile OS for smart phones and most of the times proved it. Google and OHS and other guys are working on Android but not a single commercially developed device is available that runs the Android Platform. Android is backed by Google, which lacks experience in terms of mobile phone and mobile OS. Google is just focusing making Android a platform where Google can run its advertisements and capture the mobile phone space of end customers. Though Android is a mobile Linux initiative, Symbian as of now, does not have any real threat from Android, as such kind of Linux initiatives have been launched often by other consortiums earlier. Symbian is here to stay, it take lot of time and effort to build a successful mobile OS that supports wide range of chipsets and firmware, Android is far behind Symbian on this front.

Symbian Maintaining its Market Share

Symbian is currently dominating the smart phone OS market and will continue to do so by offering rich multimedia functionalities, robust security features, multi-touch screen support. Symbian will focus on getting things you see on the Internet in your phone and this is what a lot of people want and look for these days. In future, Symbian will get competition from Linux based open mobile OS platforms like LiMo and Android. To tackle such competition, it will be necessary for Symbian to become more open than it is, in its present state. The future lies in applications that can be easily downloaded on the mobile phone and don’t take much of space in the mobile phones. Developers developing such applications running on the Symbian platform will also boost the acceptance of Symbian platform. Symbian will face tough competition from Linux, which is open as well as low cost. Also, close ties with Nokia will help Symbian to shape up its future, keeping the fact in mind that Nokia is a market leader in the mobile handset industry.

Unique features of Symbian can be,

It is best when it comes to hardware access as compared to j2me and Brew OS. Anybody can develop software in this OS with the SIS extension and they get good support from Symbian given the fact that they are third party applications. The OS, on the overall level is pretty fast and the browsing is quick.

As the key market leader for mobile operating systems Symbian somewhat quietly touches the life of hundreds of millions every day.   People generally know their mobile phone brand but don't know much if anything about the underlying operating system, which for most data enabled phones is ... Symbian.

From the Symbian Website we learn this about the rise of Symbian to mobile OS dominance:

• There are 206 million Symbian shipments across 235 different phone models.
  
• 18.5m Symbian mobile phones shipped in first Quarter of 2008. 
  
• 92% growth in consulting services for Symbian and there are over 9000 third-party Symbian applications.
  
• The world's five leading handset vendors - Motorola, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, and LG announced nine products based on Symbian OS v9.
  

The following consumer technology benchmarks are a clear indication of how much broader this market will become in the oming years: 

• 291.6 million mobile phones shipped in Q1 2008
  
• 1.7 million iPhones shipped in the quarter ending March 2008
  
• 10.6 million iPods shipped in the quarter ending March 2008 
  
• 2.18 million BlackBerry subscriber accounts and 4.4 million devices shipped in the quarter March 2008
  
• 1.24 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2008 according to Strategy Analytics
  
• Total smartphone sales will break the 1 billion unit mark by 2010
  
• Only 69.5 million PCs were shipped in Q1 2008 (all desktops, servers and laptops)

Source: Symbian

Does Google's Android platform offer a real threat to Symbian?

Yes, I do not agree with this Symbian statement and think the key threat to Symbian is Google Android and the open handset alliance.    The phones that will come from this massive partnership will offer the same type of functionality as Symbian phones.   However, given the staggering size of the market there is plenty of room for many players in this space.   Although makers will want to work with Google they'll insist on the stability and reliability Symbian has provided them, and it seems likely handset makers will work with all parties as long as it is not cost prohibitive.   Android started with a bang and now one hears only whimpers so it is not clear that the early promise will be realized for Android.   Nonetheless good advice to Symbian is to be prepared to adapt to the rapidly changing market conditions that start .... yesterday.

How do you think Symbian will compete to maintain its market share as the dominant smartphone OS?

Symbian is likely to remain competitive on the basis of stable and tested quality deployments, existing relationships with handset manufacturers (especially Nokia which owns about half of Symbian), and their renewed committment to open architectures.    Unless the Android open source community shows more promise than it has in these early days of the Open Handset Alliance, Symbian should have several years to consolidate and grow its market position vis a vis Android.   That said, I would predict a massive shift to cheap and full featured handsets that will be made in China according to cutthroat pricing standards.    Symbian's current cost per instance of approximately 2.50-5.00 may have to be reduced to keep the OS competitive with a free Android OS as Android improves. 

Are there unique features of Symbian that will be hard to imitate?

Initially I'm guessing that application stability will be Symbian's strongest suit vis a vis Android, but realistically it is likely that Google and partners will devote enough resources to Android to make it imitate Symbian in all significant respects.

What capabilities should consumers look forward to with Symbian phones?

Every capability, and this wil be Symbian's challenge as open source development leads to a plethora of exciting new mobile applications - a market that will be driven powerfully by users hungry to do more and more with their smartphone.  

Look for geolocation and geotagging via your mobile device and superior photography and video capabilites such that you'll take a picture or video, upload it to the web, and immediately have the picture tagged with your current location.   Social applications will explode in the mobile space to include complex Massively Multiplayer Gaming experiences as well as dramatic improvements to standard web gaming on your mobile device.  Although collaborative work environments will need to be supported such as quality mobile versions of calendars and documents, I think the social and gaming space is where the amazing applications and amazing development will come together in exciting ways.

Happy Birthday Symbian! 

In 2001, I interviewed Symbian's CEO, Colly Myers. He was intensely committed to cellphones — he was using an Ericsson R380 smartphone — but he said he hoped someday to have the option of using a fold-out keyboard.

Myers envisioned a future with more processing power on phones and a lot more development for the mobile platform, I read later. At the time Symbian was locked in a battle for survival with Microsoft — and less than a year later, Myers resigned suddenly.

It's a different world now. Fold-out keyboards are plentiful, cell phones can play full-color video — and Symbian has the dominant smartphone operating system. In 2006 Symbian announced they'd reached a milestone — 100 million Symbian smartphones, shipped to over network operators. (Ironically, this was two years after the the first reports of Symbian worms like Caribe). But the biggest threat to Symbian now isn't Microsoft — it's Google.

In the short-term, Symbian is secure. Android hasn't been released yet, and its final release date is still hard to nail down. (The last rumor I heard suggested September of 2008.) Even then, Android will need to grow a community of developers. Android would ultimately needs a critical mass of users, developers, and installations — and I can't see that even starting to happen until sometime near 2010.

Remember that Symbian enters this battle with a head start of 100 million phones. That's important, because ultimately the prevailing operating system will be determined by a handful of key players. Symbian can still boast that they're the industry standard — and if nothing else, there's an inertia that works in their favor. And Symbian's developers have to be happy knowing that they're developing for such a huge user base.

That's the good news for Symbian. But the bad news is the cell phone market is definitely changing. It's always been competitive, and Symbian has real worries that an Android developer will someday create a killer app that Symbian can't replicate. Apple's iPhone also raised the expectations consumers had for the interfaces on their phones. (And the iPhone even started a growing backlash to "closed networks," with Congressional hearings and vocal opposition from Google.)
So there's a feeling of flux in the market.

But right now, Symbian's dominance seems secure. In "internet time," 10 years is a century. So let's hope the next "century" brings even better experiences to the cell phone consumers of the future.

And whatever happened to Colly Myers? Legend has it that a friend later asked him a random question — what was the word for a baby herring? Myers messaged friend with his cellphone — and then realized he'd discovered a business opportunity. In 2004 he started "Any Question Answered," a British SMS service which now boasts over 1,450 researchers.

I hope he also finally got a fold-out keyboard....