* Posts by Jerry Panagrossi

1 publicly visible post • joined 23 Sep 2008

Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones

Jerry Panagrossi

All good comments...even the firey ones

The article, or rather the headline of the article, didn't quite capture the wider context of the discussion and my comments made as a panelist at the Mobilize event in San Francisco last week. In particular, the point that I made regarding the costs associated with developing operating system platforms for mobile phones, regardless of whether it’s Symbian OS based, Linux based or other, was not accurately represented.

GigaOM posted a video of the panel session, which can be found at:

http://events.gigaom.com/mobilize/08/Watch#Platform-Face-Off-The-Economics-of-Development

If you fast-forward 34 minutes into the video, you will see that the point that I was making regarding Linux was not that it is unfit for mobile phones but rather that "fitness" as a concern for mobile handset manufacturers comes down to an issue of license versus labor--you either license a mature mobile platform, such as Symbian OS, which has been purpose-built for mobiles, has shipped on 225+ million phones and has evolved to meet stringent market requirements over the past 10 years, or you invest in the labor required to develop a solution based on Linux, which is a non-trivial investment.

As we prepare for the next exciting chapter in the evolution of Symbian OS, we look forward to delivering a unified Symbian platform to the open source community and making it available royalty-free under the terms of the Eclipse Public License (EPL). As an open source offer, Symbian OS--the most proven, widely adopted, open mobile platform with global industry support--will enable all players throughout the mobile value chain to maximize benefits from economies of scale and thereby decrease development costs.

// Jerry