Symbian tries to crash Apple's WWDC party
As the Apple faithful gather in San Francisco on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Symbian, the world's largest mobile operating system vendor, is prowling the streets outside Moscone with a tantalizing proposition for iPhone developers: make more money by reaching more consumers with Symbian:
Starting at 7:30 AM PDT, Symbian will start handing out invitations to join Symbian at Jillian's for a Symbian Hack-a-thon (1:00 - 4:00 PDT, with happy hour kicking in at 5:00 and running until 7:00). Jillian's is located directly across the street from the conference at the Sony Metreon.
The invitations come with a rubber duck, but Symbian is also trying to wake up Apple's attendees with free coffee at the nearby Starbucks. Starbucks expects to serve 600 developers before the keynote starts, and Symbian wants to reach every one of them.
The group isn't just promising long-term success, either: hack-a-thon attendees, who will be able to code for Web runtime, Python (S60), or Flash Lite, will be given a free Nokia 5800 for their troubles, following Google's giveaway of an Android-based G1 phone at Google I/O.
Symbian has posted very strong numbers in mobile data consumption and market share. Even so, the open-source foundation has struggled to get its brand out into the market, as CNET reports, and is now playing catch-up with Apple's iPhone.
The newfound aggression bodes well for Symbian's ability to compete with Apple and other mobile platforms. Apple has made the market care about mobile operating systems, which means it's no longer sufficient for Symbian to be big but anonymous. If it wants to remain a big player in mobile, it must lose the anonymity.
Attendees at Monday's WWDC are about to learn about Symbian, perhaps for the first time. Let competition ring.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I worked in Silicon Valley for many years and it always seemed like the best & brightest developers migrated toward the emerging platforms & technologies. There was still a lot of money to be made on the legacy stuff, but they preferred to be "on the edge".
Symbian, like WinMo, needs a MAJOR update. Windows Mobile 7 is suppose to be that for WinMo. Perhaps Symbian has similar plans (Maemo?). For now, though, they are a tougher sell to top developers than the new kids on the block.
iPhone OS has been around for 2 years and it's infinitely better than Symbian, which is like 15 years old. Developers are not stupid, they can see that Symbian's got no future unless they totally revamp the OS.
Nokia makes great phone hardware, but Symbian is a disaster.
the normal version is decent actually a lot better than say Sony's UIQ
Symbian's UI is just not fluid, it's unpleasant to use, it's also ugly and flickery. I'm not saying it's a total disaster, but it's just unworthy of Nokia's excellent hardware.
Just one example: Half the time time when you're opening a menu, "(No Data Found)" flickers across the screen for a short time before the list appears - in my book, that's just lack of fit and finish. A serious, multibillion corporation like Nokia is expected to do better than that, especially when its competition is showing off 3D, super-fluid, natural touch UIs.
I don't doubt that the Symbian people should try to point out that they have a large platform, but even Nokia doesn't have Apple's clout and certainly not even close in terms of business acumen. Apple has the whole package that sells big-time. Apple never said anything like they would steal developers from other platforms. They just put their SDK on the table and said, we think we can help (all) you developers sell your apps. And the developers came and are still coming in an endless flow.
- by m_p_wilcox June 9, 2009 1:02 AM PDT
- Interesting comments, some of them showing the out dated perceptions that the new Symbian is trying to get rid of.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(13 Comments)>> but the Symbian OS is not fun to work with or write code for it. It is a boring OS like Windows CE
I don't think even many die-hard Symbian fans would argue with this for native Symbian C++, but this is being phased out for application development. The hackathon was all about writing Python, Flash, or Web apps using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.
>> I think you hit on the root of the problem. The iPhoneOS, Android & WebOS are what you might classify as "modern" smartphone OSes. Symbian & WinMo/Windows CE, while prolific in the marketplace...due to their age...are what you might classify as "legacy" OSes, even though they are being incrementally improved.
But Symbian is getting a major update, go to the Symbian Developer website and take a look at the plans for Symbian^4 - Qt replacing the current application framework and a new touch optimised UI is being developed. Not as fast as some of us would have liked, but really good plans to renew the platform.
It's worth taking a look at how Symbian has changed and is changing before dismissing it as "old".
Mark
P.S. Maemo, is a completely separate Linux-based platform developed independently by Nokia (and the open source community).