Samsung plans Symbian-free future

Samsung's roadmap includes Windows mobile, Android and its new Bada platform, but there's no sign of Symbian in the plan. The details come from Samsung VP Don Joo Lee, who told Digitimes that the company would be giving up on Symbian to focus on Android, Windows Mobile and Bada-based handsets, in its continuing campaign to …

[paul brain]

what's the point of another new OS

Why bother creating another Linux based OS, when there is Android ? , The beauty of Android is that we'll end up with Mobile phone operating environment convergence ( with the exception of iPhone )

I don't understand why Samsung would go to the effort to re-invent the wheel, when there is already a free and rapidly developing environment ?

[Mage]

Future

It's even harder to see one for Windows Mobile.

We'll see what adding QT instead of UIQ and S60/S80/S90 does for Symbian.

And moving Maemo to use QT also

A bit early to write the obituaries.

We may see Android & Symbian competing for top place.

iPhone in 3rd

Maemo (nokia and others?), Palm & RIM compete for 4th, 5th & 6th.

and WinMo in 7th.

Symbian (Symbian + QT, not Symbian + S60) and Maemo (Linux + QT) are more "open" than Android. Android may be OS, but the idea is phones as locked to Google & Operator as iPhone is to iTunes and Operator.

QT != Quicktime, but the formerly Trolltech QUI Tool environment that has I believe been used for KDE and runs on OS X, Windows, Linux, Symbian etc...

[Grant Quinn]

Genius or stupidity.

I am in two minds about this.

On the one hand, we don't really need another smartphone platform. There's Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile which are all open to any manufacturer. There's WebOS, iPhone OS and Blackberry OS which are all platform specific AND Samsung already has LiMo on some phones.

On the other hand, if Samsung are going to use Bada across the entire range, and actually cease producing feature phones, then it could be a runaway success. The perfect example of that is LG who have their own proprietary semi-smartphone OS on millions of handsets across multiple models. If Samsung have everything on the one OS and they make sure there's an on-device app store for every handset, they could make a killing. Yes, I'm aware that LG still have some handsets with Windows and Symbian on them, but that's because they need those devices in their lineup or they'd lose sales.

The difficulty however will be attracting developers to the platform to make all those apps, and for that reason I think they would have been better adopting Symbian (or possibly Android) instead of re-inventing the wheel. Keeping Android in their lineup, when it has no enterprise market share, just complicates things.

[IT specialist]

Bizarre backflip

Yesterday, the Telecoms Korea newspaper said that Samsung was to discard Windows Mobile. It even had detailed graphs and statistics acquired at an analysts' meeting.

http://www.telecomskorea.com/market-8281.html

Today, Samsung does a backflip, and now says it will retain Windows Mobile. Did they upset Microsoft or something? Did they have to make it sound not so bad for Redmond?

Android - Bada - Winmo, That still leaves them with 3 operating systems to design for, which will increase the design headaches for them.

[Jolyon]

@Paul Brain

Why bother?

Presumably so that when they tie up a massive deal with MS to bundle all their web apps they can have a Goodfellas style Bada Bing! ad campaign.

[jon 77]

Ok linux geeks....

please tell me, they say Maemo is a Debian liux, does that mean that I can just get any debian software(eg many browsers, graphic editors, etc..) and install it on a N900??

[Daniel B.]

QT

I actually like this multi-platform GUI environment. It has been the only C++ GUI that I've found easy to learn and use, and was my main platform before I took on Java.

Development for BlackBerry OS is with Java, so it doesn't look weird. WinMo is C#/:NET I suppose (whoever still uses VB should be shot on sight) and I suppose that the Linux-based offers are C++ based (especially those using QT) so it isn't too hard to learn on these ones.

iPhone requires that Smalltalk-wannabe ObjC, but then again, some devs have actually started learning that as well, but the learning curve might be steep for those used to C-like languages.

[jodyfanning]

Already retracted by Samsung...

And of course it was all a misunderstanding and Samsung has already retracted the rumour about Symbian.

In other rumours it is suspected that bada is just a version of the Touchwiz interface.