David Wood of the Symbian Foundation at its office in Foster City, Calif.
(Credit: Mats Lewan/CNET)Just about everyone knows the iPhone--and perhaps also that it runs on Apple's operating system--though the phone only has about 10 percent market share among smartphones. Far fewer know the name of the most widely used mobile operating system, which holds nearly 50 percent of the market: Symbian.
As recently as 2007, Symbian had 70 percent share. Market share has been lost mainly because of the iPhone with its Mac OS X, and to BlackBerry devices running on RIM's Blackberry operating system.
To find out how Symbian plans to strike back, CNET News met last week with David Wood, "catalyst and futurist" at the Symbian Foundation.
He revealed that the company has no plans for its own app store, but explained how Symbian plans to make it easier for developers to negotiate with several stores, like the Nokia Ovi Store, which got off to a bumpy start last week. On Tuesday, a developer's Web site for the new open-source Symbian went public.
He also explained the influence Nokia is likely to have on the Symbian OS.
But first he made it clear that the U.K.-based company now is growing aggressively, with the expansion happening largely at its Foster City, Calif., office.
"We have 72 employees today and intend to grow to a bit less than 200," he said. "Many will be in the Silicon Valley, in part to tap into the skills here."
... Read more
The Palm Pre. Still no word on pricing.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)LAS VEGAS--As the device with the most mystery attached to it, there were plenty of questions left after Palm introduced its Pre on Thursday. I had a chance to sit down with Palm ...
Read the full post at CNET's CES 2009 blog.
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