Symbian V/s Maemo: who will be the most favoured child

There has been a lot of talk about Symbian being abandoned by Nokia in favour of Maemo for their high end devices by the year 2012. Ben Smith mentions this in his post. That’s where it first appeared and has been picked up by everyone.

Nokia, in a bid to salvage the insider news spill stated that it is not shifting away from S60. It’s funny that this is so surprising. With Nokia having spun Symbian off into a foundation and made it independent of itself, was in a way the beginning. Then came the N97, which was everything one wanted from a Nokia and almost an iPhone killer, but firmware problems were abound, Nokia had begun to ship ‘half’ finished devices and attempted to fix them with firmware updates. This made it abundantly clear that Symbian was not going to shape their high end devices anymore, at least not the touch devices. there were too many problems with it’s implementation on touch devices.

Personally speaking, the S60 is a robust OS on a non touch phone, it’s still the one to beat here. But with the competitors (Samsung, LG, Apple, etc) having deciphered this secret, they have simply worked around the ‘problem’.

The touch factor bought in a lot of challenges, which still hasn’t been completely solved. Nokia was beginning to lose it’s game and for a brief moment it was lost. It needed something to bounce back.

Nokia being Nokia, did some research and worked around the problem and brought in Maemo, an OS which it had developed for it’s Internet Tablets. The OS was fresh, and could be developed as a full fledged OS for future devices. Being a Linux based OS, development would not be that complex. To add to that, they made Maemo completely open, this meant that one would be able to get apps and various things in huge quantities and fast.

So is Symbian no longer Nokia’s favourite child? I don’t think so, Symbian which has been developed so much by Nokia (predominantly) will still remain a part of it’s software solution, it’s focus might change and instead of doing duty on only middle to high end end devices, it might be loaded onto devices which are more tuned towards the mass market. Thus fulfilling a void that no manufacturer is interested in fulfilling or is not currently looking at. One look at Nokia’s portfolio today, and you can see that it is slowly creating that gap within it’s portfolio and when the new Symbian OS is out, one could very well see it on devices in that segment. At the same time, I don’t think Symbian will be completely ruled from their mid end devices category.

With this new approach of giving something different and new to their high end phone customers, Nokia is attempting to reinvigorate the top end of their devices and bring it back into the limelight for the right reasons. At the time of the launch of the N95, the software was one of the ‘wow’ factors of the device, with the N900, Nokia is attempting to recapture that emotion again. But with the market becoming so diverse and big also the addition of the ‘app’ store, now a cornerstone of having an OS, the dynamics of this market has evolved. The external variables have now become internal variables. An OS without applications supported by the handset manufacturers now is a dead investment. Nokia has all the cards and the coming few years will see how the ‘Big Blue’ plays out it’s cards and reshapes the industry. It is clearly a gamble, and Nokia has a lot to gain and lose.

The possible future of Nseries devices? maybe