Symbian: We have time to beat Apple's iPhone
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.
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 think they could solve half their problems by cutting the number of models from 200 to about 12. That must be a logistical, manufacturing, R&D, OS and inventory nightmare.
I was at a fair all weekend as a vendor and I saw a lot of iPhone's in normal non-business, non teen hands. stay at home moms (not the glamorous types), normal soccer dads, .....regular people. Evey one of them said something like: "I never really cared about what kind of phone I had before, but this one does so much stuff and it's really cool"
Tear it a part all you want, but the consumer who cars nothing of processor speeds and not having an app store fight's the battle. Pretty shiny things that work pretty good and cost a lot win. Otherwise more people would be driving Kia's
There obviously is a battle for the hearts and minds of smart phone programmers. And right now Apple has captured the vast majority.
Two things come to mind, which Mr. Wood was not asked about:
1) The iPhone was a paradigm shift which caught Nokia & Symbian completely flat-footed. Just like Microsoft (Zune & WinMob), Symbian is now struggling to play catch-up, while Apple is still innovating. Is there anyone at MS or Symbian with the vision to one-up Apple? Smart money says no. When Microsoft finally shipped the Zune, it was already obsolete. They had aimed at Apple's 2-year-old product, and hit the target perfectly -- or would have, if the target hadn't been moved a half-mile down the road in the meantime. Is there any reason to believe Symbian won't fall into that same trap? If and when Symbian ships an OS that can compete with iPhone 1.0, Apple will have shipped iPhone 5.0.
2) It took Apple 2.5 years to conceive, design, engineer and deliver iPhone 1.0. Symbian (and MS) have had 2.5 years since the iPhone was introduced, to get off their hineys and invest in creating a modern mobile OS, yet all they've produced so far is hot air. Perhaps Mr. Wood and his colleages are too relaxed.
So there you go. Symbian has to catch up on the interface and Apple on the basics.
On the other hand I'm eager to know what will the Symbian open os will look like and how they will market it.
Until now the best value for your $$$ is the upcoming E72 IMHO.
likewise, Nokia is trying to create with Ovi an "ecosystem" comparable to iTunes. but so is Microsoft and Android and Sony and everyone else. and with all their different models on different telcos, they just confuse everyone. only RIM has an equally focused user service - but for enterprise mainly.
this guy is talking brave and running scared.
Symbian can do a LOT, but it suffers from being a million things stacked on a million other things. Not to mention the keyboard short cuts seem completely undocumented and unless you use those it seems to take forever to do just about anything. The E71 is a nice phone, but it's a lousy smart phone. The hardware is really solid and I can't knock that. Well actually I think the keyboard sucks compared to a BlackBerry. But the problem is, that people don't want smart phones to be REALLY good phones, they want them to be REALLY SMART phones and Nokia's offerings are pretty dumb.
I always love to hear that WinMo devices have way more features than an iPhone. I'm sure there is some truth to that since WinMo has been around for many years, but soccer moms and non-techies just can't easily figure out how to use them. That's why people like iPhones. Even if iPhones do have ultimately less features than a WinMo device, most people just can't spend the time trying to figure out how to use them. I don't care what type of hardware you put on a handset, if it's too difficult to use, it will bring high customer dissatisfaction, end of story.
And even though Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone as being a toy, he sure hustled out the Windows App Store (Windows Marketplace?) at breakneck speed. But then again, so did all the other handset competitors.
Steve Jobs referred to this problem during his Jan '07 iPhone introduction, saying that so-called smartphones definitely had more features than regular ol' cellphones, but were actually harder to use. For instance, many users couldn't figure out how to use the address book, so they just used their Recents as their address book.
get with the program and switch to capacitive touch screens
resistive screens are crap
Now the iPhone is out for a while, the initial buzz is gone I am hearing more people complain about them.
A figure i would love to see is if the annual iPhone sales are based on net new customers or is it people upgrading to the latest version. Effectively, how many iPhones are in use against how many have been sold.
I believe all the platforms have a chance for major success. How most people use their phones now against how they will use them in 2 years time will be very different and when a product/service goees mainstream then price becomes a bigger factor - this is an area where Apple never plays. So, the other manufacturers can soak up profitable marketshare while Apple stick with its traditional makretplace.
Some of the comments here deserve an answer.
I try to be calm but that doesn't mean I'm complacent. I believe the same goes for very many of my colleagues inside the Symbian Foundation and in companies in the Symbian community. Goodness knows, the mobile industry is fast-changing and challenging. In order to survive (let alone prosper) is going to require a superb level of performance. There's not the slightest room for complacency.
As it happens, my <a href="http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/06/it-was-twenty-years-ago-today.html">21 year history</a> (at Psion / Symbian v1 / Symbian v2) has been filled with times of great uncertainty and trauma. Every year, it seemed there were new mighty competitors or industry-reshaping alliances that commentators thought would herald the death-knell for EPOC/Symbian software. (Anyone remember Windows CE v2? That was described to me a dozen times over as being poised, without any shadow of doubt, to steamroller all competition.) These 21 years were, therefore, full of angst - and huge amounts of hard work. So the angst of the present day challenges are not entirely new to me. That's one reason I can be somewhat philosophical about them.
Nevertheless, it's clear to me that these challenges come at a higher-level of seriousness and intensity than any I've experienced before. So in the Symbian world, we recognise that we need to up our game. (I've written more about this at the end of <a href="http://blog.symbian.org/2009/06/17/riding-the-transition-urgently">this recent blog posting</a>.)
I don't buy into the stark "black and white" worldviews that are sometimes expressed: "all Nokia products are inferior to all products from XX or YY", etc. I see plenty of real value in the new products such as the N86, E72, N97... Equally, I see plenty of room for improvement in these products. But I also see the means emerging (in the open source Symbian innovation engine) to make these improvements both quickly and decisively.
// David Wood, Symbian
The hardware is very good but the user experience is just mediocre and nowadays that is what we users care for the most. If I were you, I would take it easy on open-sourcing, Ovi Store or whatever other "features" you're planning to add, and concentrate on making UI the best in the world, better than iPhone and Pre.
- by timlayton June 25, 2009 11:41 AM PDT
- If you look at the current market numbers comparing symbian, WebOS, windows mobile and iPhone I think it is clear that symbian has their work cut out for them at best. Success in this space about presenting clear and compelling choices. So let me break this down for you. As a random exercise I just called 5 of my friends, 3 of which are IT managers and the other 2 work with technology on a daily basis. All 5 of them are heavy smart-phone users. All 5 of them had never even heard the word "symbian" and asked me what I was talking about. If I stopped 5 random people on the street and just said the words "windows" or "iPhone" they would all know what I was talking about. Understand?
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(18 Comments)