Wireless

Symbian has the market share; Apple's iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers. Microsoft, with its long-standing interest in developers, also needs to reach out to open-source developers, if it wants to succeed.

Part of this reason is cost. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests, Research In Motion could reduce its cost and improve the reach of its platform through open source:

RIM should be utilizing R&D investments more effectively by leveraging existing open-source projects. RIM could have built (its software development kit) for a lower investment by starting with PhoneGap or an equivalent open-source framework...This was absolutely a missed opportunity for RIM to compete versus Apple, Palm, and others using open source.

No, I'm not going to suggest that RIM open-source the BlackBerry Enterprise Server; that would be silly. Rather, I believe RIM could have saved R&D costs, increased the value of its BlackBerry platform, and influenced developers building for the iPhone, if RIM had built the Widget SDK on top of (an) open-source project like PhoneGap.

Symbian is taking this road, as Michael Mace points out, putting developers, and not itself, at the center of attention. The more money third-party developers can make with Symbian, the better off Symbian will be.

Palm, too, is trying to appeal to open-source developers by making it cheap and lucrative to develop for Palm devices.

Apple's world, by contrast, comes with a hugely sexy device, optimized distribution...and low return on investment for its developers, according to Newsweek. In Apple's world, developers add value to Apple, but not necessarily to themselves.

Microsoft is different. Although the company has not committed its mobile strategy to open source, it is a company that has a serious romance with developers. With 97 percent of its sales coming through its channel, Microsoft depends upon third-party development and distribution partners.

Windows Mobile 6.5

(Credit: Microsoft)

Now Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.5, a light upgrade to previous versions that has failed to catch the media's attention. Today, the company has few--246, to be exact--applications available for version 6.5 in its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but it has more than 20,000 designed for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1.

The question, however, is whether it can attract new developers to the seemingly moribund Windows Mobile, which declined in market share to just 9 percent of handsets shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. An open-source complement strategy, similar to what it's using for SharePoint and its CRM product, could help.

It must, as Google is calling.

Microsoft has no choice but at least dabble in open source, regardless of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's publicly sanguine stance on Google. Open-source Google Android is starting to make waves, even if its momentum can be overhyped. Verizon has jumped on the Android bandwagon, citing the "unmatched openness and flexibility of the Android platform."

Open source isn't an afterthought for Google. It's a core business strategy. And it's winning converts.

Ballmer pooh-poohs Android and further discards "free as a business model," but he acknowledges that Android represents open source, with significant financial resources behind it.

There's more to it than this. Free is a great business model, one that Microsoft has used to tremendous effect, as Internet Explorer, SharePoint, Bing, and other Microsoft successes demonstrate and as Techdirt highlights.

Microsoft needs to integrate open source into its mobile strategy. It needs developer attention. As CNET's Ina Fried reports, a recent Windows Mobile 6.5 session at Code Camp attracted just six developers. You don't win with numbers like that, and you don't get developers without open source, anymore.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple. Microsoft rightly recognized early on that building products soup-to-nuts, as Apple does, was not the best model to achieve ubiquity (even if some suggest that this model has broken the PC industry). That model works great, early in the formation of a market, as Clayton Christensen theorizes, but it loses its efficacy in mature markets.

Mobile doesn't yet count as "mature," but it's getting there fast.

An enabling strategy similar to what Microsoft did on the "desktop" would succeed in mobile, too, but it's going to require a Googlesque open-source approach for Microsoft--not the Apple approach.

This isn't to suggest that Microsoft should open-source everything. As I learned from my own open-source mobile days at Lineo, to build a successful business in mobile (or elsewhere), you've got to own something.

Google is interested in owning the advertising that results from greater mobile Web browsing and other mobile services. For Microsoft, it could match this, and extend it with ties to its server and personal computer businesses, like SharePoint. It probably can't afford, however, to try to build a big per-unit licensing business--not with Google undermining that model with its free Android.

Microsoft simply needs to find the right "format" in which to deliver its open-source mobile strategy. The software giant has 90,000-plus employees. Surely, one of them can figure this out.

Panasonic and NEC announced nine new cell phone on Tuesday that use the open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system called LiMo.

As the mobile phone market evolves, software is becoming more crucial to handset development.

Apple set the bar high with its iPhone, which uses a form of Apple's own proprietary operating system used in its computers. Other companies have followed suit with advanced software of their own, namely Google with its Android mobile software. Like LiMo, Android is based on open source Linux. So far only two devices have been introduced running the Android software, but several handset makers including Motorola and Samsung are expected to release new Android-based devices.

Still, Nokia, the number one handset maker in the world, leads the market with its Symbian software platform.

Linux is the most popular type of free or open source computer software available. And it has had some success in the computer environment where Linux suppliers are earn revenue by selling improvements and technical services to support Linux. This is a very different model from Microsoft, which licenses its Windows operating system and does not share its code openly with developers.

Now Linux is coming to the mobile market, where it promises to help lower costs for handset makers. The LiMo foundation, which is made up of a consortium of companies, has been shepherding development for mobile devices in the hopes that it can become one of the major operating systems used in the handset market. So far, LiMo has not been a huge success, as competition from other software and handset makers has been fierce.

The announcement of the new Panasonic and NEC phones is seen as a positive sign that handset makers are starting to support the new software. Other handset makers, such as Samsung and LG Electronics, are also members of the LiMo Foundation. But so far these companies haven't introduced phones using the LiMo software. In 2008, Motorola introduced some devices using LiMo.

Meanwhile, most of the world's largest cell phone makers, including Samsung, LG, Nokia, and Motorola, have said that they will soon introduce phones using the Android operating system.

Still, LiMo does have support from some of the world's biggest mobile carriers, including Vodafone, France Telecom SA's Orange, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, South Korea's SK Telecom, Telefonica and U.S. operator Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Vodafone and Verizon Communications. LiMo also said Japanese mobile carrier KDDI Corp and touch screen company Immersion Corp have joined the not-for-profit foundation.

The Symbian Foundation has released its first open-source software package, the first step in the organization's plan to eventually open-source the entire Symbian mobile operating system.

The Symbian Foundation was set up by in June 2008 by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T to oversee the development of the Symbian OS as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The OS had previously been developed as proprietary software by the Symbian Foundation.

On Wednesday, Symbian made available its first package covered by the EPL, the OS Security Package, according to Symbian developer Craig Heath.

"The OS Security Package source code is now available under the EPL, and it is the very first package to be officially moved from the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL) to...the EPL," Heath wrote in a blog post.

Heath said the EPL would allow the security package to bypass export regulations in the U.K., where the Symbian code is legally based.

"There is an exemption for software 'in the public domain,' meaning that open-source software isn't export-controlled, so moving it from SFL to EPL was the most straightforward way to make sure that the complete cryptographic functionality would be available to all," he wrote.

The move is also intended to demonstrate that Symbian is "serious" about both open source and security, according to Heath. The next step will be to open source the Symbian kernel, along with a basic set of components and drivers, according to Symbian chief architect Daniel Rubio.

"It has to be accompanied by all other components and drivers to run a shell with full I/O--for example, a Board Support Package, a hardware vehicle and, of course, a freely available toolchain," Rubio said in a blog post. "The good news is that we are working hard to make this happen in the short term, which in my mind is a three-month horizon."

Alongside the shift to open source, Symbian is working to integrate several components of the old software into a new operating system that will be released under the name Symbian ^2. The new OS is to be based on version 9 of the Symbian OS and will integrate the S60, UIQ, and MOAP user interfaces, according to Symbian. It is planned to begin beta testing in the next few weeks, and could appear in handsets in the first half of next year.

In March, Symbian said it plans to release a new version of the OS every six months, with Symbian ^3 planned for the middle of this year. Symbian competes with a number of mobile operating systems, including Apple's iPhone OS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Matthew Broersma of ZDNet UK reported from London.

One element was striking in Tuesday's joint press release from Intel and Nokia: Symbian was not mentioned.

Symbian is the dominant operating system for smartphones with a 50 percent market share. Nokia has been using it for 10 years.

Instead, Nokia and Intel declared that they will "develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects."

Both are Linux-based platforms: Moblin is supported by Intel and Maemo is used by Nokia in its Internet Tablets such as N810 (the only modern touch-screen devices that Nokia made until it finally launched its touch-screen 5800 Xpress Music phone in October 2008).

Already in May, rumors had started that Nokia would ditch Symbian and go with Maemo in future smartphones.

The rumors were based on a several factors:

• Even though it is the dominant smartphone OS, Symbian is way behind Apple and iPhone in making users aware of applications. (Nokia acquired Symbian last year and transferred the code to the Symbian Foundation, which will transform it into open source.)

• Nokia has declared that the next generation of Maemo, Fremantle, or Maemo 5, will support 3G connectivity.

• In May, Intel and Nokia formed oFono, an open-source project for developing easy-to-use APIs for telephony applications, possibly to give Maemo voice and SMS capabilities.

• A future version of Maemo, Harmattan, allegedly will be put on at least one mobile phone, according to Mobile Crunch.

David Wood, the "futurist and catalyst" at the Symbian Foundation, responded to these rumors in a blog post last month. "To my mind, it makes perfect sense for phone companies to investigate at least two modern mobile operating systems," he wrote. "For example, Nokia is investigating Maemo (now coupled with oFono) in parallel to its main usage of the Symbian platform."

Clearly, Nokia and Intel have big plans for Linux-based devices. In Tuesday's statement they said they will "define a new mobile platform beyond today's smartphones, notebooks and netbooks."

It's also clear that from a hardware point of view, the two companies share many synergies. Apparently, Nokia intends to use Linux on jointly developed hardware, rather than Symbian.

This might be a future strategy to fight the strong competition coming from Apple and others in the smartphone market.

"I think Nokia might look at widening its Linux Maemo offering beyond its N800 family of products in order to differentiate itself in the high end", said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at analyst firm Gartner.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Nokia will ditch Symbian altogether. More likely, Nokia will keep it in its lineup of midrange phones, as is actually the case today.

A glue holding the two systems together is the development environment Qt (pronounced "cute"), based on open-source code from Trolltech, a company that Nokia acquired in 2008. Qt will be used both in Symbian and Maemo and could offer a possibility for cross-developing applications.

One remaining question is whether the partnership with Intel can help Nokia match the huge advantage Apple has secured in applications awareness in consumers' minds.

I had dinner Monday night in London with David Wood, futurist at Symbian, and came away feeling strangely calm. Perhaps it was the exceptional food at Veeraswamy, capped off by a bitter chocolate ice cream....

Or perhaps it was the fact that Wood has spent 21 years with Symbian (and Psion before it was acquired by Nokia), long enough to live through several mobile revolutions and not get too ruffled by any particular one.

In fact, over the course of our dinner Wood pulled out his back-to-the-future Psion Series 5mx on several occasions, a device released a decade ago yet eerily resembles the cutting-edge Netbooks and smartphones of today.

Plus ça change...

Symbian has proved to be such a formidable competitor in Europe and the Middle East, but has underwhelmed in North America and Japan, though it claims roughly 50 percent of the global handheld market. In part it stemmed from the fact that Symbian had limited target GSM wireless carriers in the U.S. (AT&T and T-Mobile). Without a CDMA offering, Symbian was locked out of much of the U.S. market.

But in June 2008, Nokia announced that Symbian would be open sourced to broaden its appeal to developers. The catch? The process would take up to two years to complete. Today, Symbian still isn't open source but is actively working toward that goal.

Unfortunately, Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and even the Palm Pre have been claiming ever-widening swaths of the global smartphone market, taking share in Symbian's European backyard. Wood isn't overly concerned. He may have good reason.

While we like to think of technology moving at incredible speed, the fact is that adoption moves much more slowly. Even in a market as dynamic as browsers, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler calls out the snail-pace shifts in browser adoption trends.

To prove his point, Wood points out how Apple's iPhone was considered near divine until the Palm Pre came out, and then suddenly criticism was heaped on the iPhone for lacking basic functionality. No multitasking? No cut-and-paste? Come on, Apple!

And so Apple has, as its soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S shows. But the Pre's launch suggests that Apple doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile mind share. If Symbian does things right and provides compelling value as an application publisher, it should have ample time to mount a serious challenge to existing smartphone competitors.

Symbian doesn't plan to launch an App Store, Apple-style. Instead, as CNET has reported, the foundation wants to serve the same role a book publisher does: provide intermediary services between application developers and the wireless carriers. Such a strategy not only gives Symbian more devices to play on, but it also makes it a valuable partner to more wireless carriers than Apple can.

It's not a given that Symbian will succeed, of course, but Wood could be right to remain calm in advance of Symbian's launch of its open-source project. The world is not standing still, waiting for Symbian's arrival. On the other hand, it's also not moving forward nearly as fast as we might think.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Open-phone specialist Koolu says it is two weeks from shipping beta developer versions of the Neo FreeRunner mobile phone running Google's open-source Android 1.5 "Cupcake" operating system.

Full consumer versions should follow toward mid-July.

Toronto-based Koolu is using the GTA02 version of the Neo FreeRunner from Openmoko, which is entirely based on open-phone standards.

Speaking to ZDNet UK at this week's Cloud Expo Europe conference in London, Koolu Chief Technology Officer Jon Hall said the phone is aimed at small and midsize businesses and at developing countries. The phone will be available worldwide.

"We're targeting businesses that want functionality in their phone that they can't get from Apple, RIM, or any of the proprietary companies," said Hall.

He said a beta version will be available for software developers and providers to port their applications to by early June.

According to Hall, who is also executive director of not-for-profit user organization Linux International, telephony is the "last bastion of closedness in our computer society".

Jon Hall

(Credit: Koolu)

He said the Koolu phone is a response to the restrictions on use imposed by telephone companies.

"They say, 'Sure, we'll sell you a telephone, but you have to use these services for this period of time and we're going to be your carrier and your ISP and don't you dare use voice over IP because we don't make any money that way.' And the customers say, 'Wait a minute, I paid for the freaking phone and it's mine, so why can't I use it as I want to?'" Hall said.

People should be able to decide which operating systems they want to run on their phone and choose the carrier, he said.

"This is a very open concept," Hall said, "and it gives you control all the way from your handset to your data center for the first time."

Toby Wolpe of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Years ago, Mozilla introduced its mobile equivalent of Firefox, then-called Minimo. Minimo unfortunately largely died of boredom within Mozilla. In early 2008, however, Mozilla resurrected Minimo as Fennec, and the heavens rejoiced (though even the heavens couldn't get it installed on [Name your mobile device of choice]).

As recently announced by Mozilla, however, Fennec just hit its second alpha release, with the option to download and install the mobile browser on Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops for testing purposes. (If you want to install it on your mobile device, you're going to need to have a Nokia N810 device on which to install it.)

Alpha 2 has made significant improvements to Fennec's performance (e.g., Faster panning and zooming plus improved responsiveness while pages are loading) and ease-of-use (e.g., Bookmarks, tabbed browsing with thumbnails, etc.)

But Ars Technica picks up on one of the best new "features" of Fennec:

As Fennec development continues to move forward, the value and significance of having the complete Firefox stack in a mobile environment is becoming increasingly apparent. Developers have already started creating innovative add-ons for the new browser that increase its functionality in various ways. For example, the TwitterBar extension allows users to post to Twitter directly from the Fennec address bar. An early Fennec port of Mozilla's Weave framework is also underway.

Like Apple's iPhone rendition of Safari, Fennec may well prove to be most disruptive when replicating and extending the desktop experience in a mobile device. This is where open-source Fennec could leapfrog its proprietary competition, including the iPhone's Safari.

Just as Mozilla's desktop Firefox set the pace for what a desktop browser can be by tapping into a disparate, global community of hackers with their own assumptions as to what a browser should mean so, too, can Fennec become the mobile browser's innovation leader by letting users define the experience, not any single company.

Much as I love Apple, I almost never use its Safari browser. If Mozilla can get Fennec right, I suspect I won't be using Apple's iPhone browser, either.

BT's Ribbit released its long-awaited Web telephony platform Monday to developers, which BT hopes will help spur innovation for new products and services in the telephony market.

Until now, most telephony advancements have been made by engineers at a particular company working on a closed, proprietary network. But now Ribbit is offering developers the chance to go behind the curtain and use its network to develop new applications.

Developers will be able to gain access to Ribbit's voice over IP SmartSwitch software, as well as a community site and support, monitoring, and management capabilities. The Ribbit platform will allow these developers to design, test, deploy, and manage voice and communication features used on the Web or within other applications. Developers will then be able to sell their applications through a Ribbit Store.

Pricing hasn't been disclosed, but BT plans to charge developers a fee based on the usage of its VoIP platform.

Ribbit, which launched the beta version of its software last year, has already demonstrated how its software can be used to enhance other Web-based applications. Previously, the company integrated its VoIP technology with Saleforce's customer relationship management software so that users can push an e-mail message into Salesforce. This allows them to attach leads and contacts. Users can also make and receive phone calls from within the Salesforce application.

So far, there are already over 600 developers involved in creating new applications on the Ribbit platform, the company said. Some of these applications involve call centers, social networking mash-ups, unified messaging, and other productivity tools.

BT, which bought Ribbit earlier this year for $105 million, said that it's also opening the software platform up to other phone companies. This would allow other carriers to easily access the wide range of new applications that are being created by the more than 7,500 developers who have signed up to use the platform since it was first available in 2007.

"Our vision from the start was 'programmable telephony'--a platform that enables developers around the globe to design, deploy and monetize the next-generation of telecommunication services," Ted Griggs, CEO of Ribbit, said in a statement. "Now, just four months after BT's acquisition of Ribbit, the platform is live, and we are open for business with developers, systems integrators, and yes, other carriers."

Ribbit is sponsoring a contest to encourage developers to come up with new applications for its platform. The company is offering $100,000 in prize money for the most innovative Ribbit integrations across five general categories. The categories are: business productivity; media, entertainment, and marketing; social networking; carrier integration; and next-gen innovation.

Symbian, the U.K.-based maker of the world's most popular smartphone operating system, is going through big changes.

As well as being taken over by Nokia, the company is preparing to convert its closed code into open source.

ZDNet.co.uk caught up with Symbian's research chief, David Wood, at this week's Symbian Smartphone Show at Earls Court in London, to discuss the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years hold for smartphone technology.

David Wood

(Credit: Symbian)

Q: It seems as though everyone is waiting for the Nokia takeover to happen before the code starts getting stripped. When is the acquisition likely to be completed?
Wood: We expect the approval for the deal sometime in Q4 this year. It's not an exact science. It's been approved in most parts of the world that need to approve it, but there's a small number left. That will happen almost certainly this year, and that will then allow us to do some of the integration. We can't do any integration at all now--it's illegal. What we're doing now is a lot of planning, but no actual change in what we're doing.

In the first half of next year, the Symbian Foundation will be established. On day one, sometime in March or April, the first version of the Foundation software will become available.

What can we expect from that version? It won't be stripped of third-party code yet, will it?
Wood: Correct. That will be available only to people who join the Foundation and who sign up to the Foundation license. There will be some parts that are open source.

So the Foundation license is not the open-source license.
Wood: The Foundation license is very similar to the open-source license, but it allows the companies to share the code only within the Foundation. It's a community source license, with as much as possible in common with the eventual (open source) license that will take over.

There is some code available as open source from day one, but completion (of the open sourcing) will be sometime in 2010. It's a sensible engineering approach--a stage-by-stage release of the code.

I was speaking earlier to the chief executive of a software firm whose code is currently in Symbian. He said there was no problem in having some proprietary elements within open-sourced code, and that this was acceptable under the GNU General Public License. That doesn't sound right.
Wood: We're not using the GPL--it's the EPL (Eclipse Public License). The EPL is indeed able to link to proprietary software. The GPL is less clear. In fact, a straight reading of the GPL says if you link to other software then that other software falls under the same license. Under the EPL, if you link to other software then there's no obligation on that other software to take the same license. EPL is weak "copyleft," whereas GPL is the most famous example of strong copyleft. So I agree with that part, that there could be code that's linked to. This is to encourage innovation.

We're not saying all software should be free of charge. We do realize that there will always be new, interesting software that people will want to monetize by selling for a license. If you change the Symbian code, that has to be given back--you can't hang onto that, so that's the copyleft part of this message.

But there is code from this company within Symbian's code--won't that have to be scraped out?
Wood: Something has to be done, and I don't really want to talk about an individual case, but in principle several things could happen. We could throw money at a supplier, and we could say to them: "We will buy this off you in perpetuity and we will make it available." Or we could say we'll leave this outside the platform and we can put something else in instead. It won't be quite the same, and we might go back to the kind of offering that we had in previous versions of Symbian. It's always possible that someone else will come along and do comparable software and make that available. There should be plenty of ways for companies (whose code is currently within Symbian's code) to recoup their investment, either by selling the software (to Symbian), or by developing a better version and making that available for an additional fee.