Symbian looks beyond Smartphones

The recently re-branded Symbian Foundation is charting a course that the organization hopes will form the genesis of a comeback. Now wholly owned by mobile phone giant Nokia, Symbian commands the largest share of the market. This is despite the fact it lost some 15 percentage points of the market share just last year--not a trivial figure by any standards. Certainly, a drastic change in strategy is called for.

For one, not only is the Symbian Foundation tweaking the Symbian operating system to run on devices with larger displays, work is also being done to let the OS run natively on a larger variety of processors. Indeed, engineers recently managed to get an unmodified copy of the base OS to run on an Intel Atom processor--the chip powering the majority of netbooks on the market today.

At the moment, Symbian appears to be in a mode of experimentation and development. Moving ahead, the path that it is plotting does appear to set it squarely against the likes of Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android operating systems, both of which also have Smartphone and Mobile Internet Device (MID) centric equivalents.

On the other hand, some analysts view Symbian's move as a purely defensive one, rather than any stroke of genius. Jim Zemlin, who is the executive director of the Linux Foundation, elaborates: "Smartphones are starting to work like PCs, and PCs like smartphones." 

Philip Solis, principal analyst at ABI probably summed up the entire situation when he said, "MIDs could displace smartphones the way smartphones displaced PDAs."

Nokia will not comment on when it may enter into the new device categories. 

To read more:
- check out this article from BusinessWeek

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