I'm sure I won't be the first, but:

"Last year Symbian made just under €48m in royalty payments. If we (conservatively) assume that a third of Symbian handsets are Nokia's then the company is paying €32m a year in royalties to Symbian."

32 is two-thirds of 48, not one-third.

Yes it's 8 year's royalties if Nokia continues to ship the same volume of Symbian phones. But right now, Symbian is really only in the high-end phones. If Nokia puts Symbian in mid-range and low-end phones as well then the Symbian shipments would increase dramatically, meaning that buying Symbian might be a very cheap way out of paying all those royalties.

"So by throwing the whole bundle into open source Nokia is attempting to allay those fears, though at a cost of their own revenue."

Anyone Jumping into that Revenue Stream is a Priceless Asset and Worth Every Cost for Prophet Profits.

King Midas Solomons Minds Territory. ..... for the Banking Industry, a Sub Primed Possession.

"So the question becomes if the Symbian Foundation could survive the demise (or radical restructuring) of its overbearing parent.

An interesting Menage a Trois for Viking Attention and Valiant ReSolution.

Will this mean that finally there will be a new "Psion" PDA? One integrating WiFi, Bluetooth and decent media applications, with a decent keyboard? One can only hope. As mentioned, there are plenty of apps waiting, just no-one wants them on a phone.

No mention of Android here? There had to be some consideration of Android in the making of this decision. The choice between an open-source proven platform and an open-source unproven platform is an easier decision than proprietary&proven vs open&unproven.

Hey I've still got the Top Speed compiler and a SSD burner, just need a Workabout or a 3c to test stuff on ;-)

Psion did make a CE and Debian (still got a beta one of these) version of the netbook but who would pay £500 to £700 quid for one of those?

Maybe some one will port a EPOC to an ASUS EEE PC!

By throwing it open source you remove a level of competition. If everyone is using the same software, then it no longer becomes a deciding factor in purchasing a phone (ok, very simplistic I know, but it boils down in this direction).

Also, they may (although the comments about HW manufacture being a low income being correct) want to concentrate on new handsets and up and coming technology. Good ol' 4G etc, they need to nail it well.

Maybe now we'll see a bit of innovation as other manufacturers (Sony Ericsson) go back to the drawing board and are forced to build from the ground up.

Symbian, for all it's popularity, has been both an achilles heel and a burden on progress. Making it Open Source means nothing, I think the term has become a buzz word used to justify (and even glorify) wreckless roadmap planning.

RIP Symbian.

Paris, cause she just wants to sms and take photos.

With competition from Android and the iPhone, I think there's been force of hand regarding Symbian OS. Certainly, it's an unfriendly platform to develop on. Signing is a developers nightmare. Getting the phone to do the most simple of tasks is a bit like playing Russian roulette in certain cases, and while Nokia and therefore Symbian OS controls much of the market in Europe, you've seen better advances coming out of the US in terms of mobile operating systems and most importantly choice.

I'd be watching out for Windows Mobile. The development tools are fantastic, the provision of C# and the increasingly modifiable interfacing make it a competitor which I believe everyone is missing. Microsoft are keeping very quiet, and while they lack market share in the mobile arena, I think they've got the real dark horse, which everyone else is trying to manufacture at present. Android doesn't exist and Apple control access to the stack. Even J2ME is slow. Linux-based phones are still rough on the edges.

We should have had the capability to produce good mobile software with present or past tools. This is not the case. It almost seems like Nokia have given up the ghost to produce a good Operating System for their phones and are desperate to try and get the rest of the world to use their systems.

Symbian is definately not just in the high end phones. The £30 payT phone I picked up the other day has S40 in it. In fact I've never had a nokia phone that didn't have some flavour of Symbian.

This seems like a way to compete with Android in the long term. Probably also a way to head off the challenge from Windows Mobile, and to a lesser extent Apple (although since they don't license their OS to other manufacturers they're not really competing in the same space).

Does anyone else think that 'amanfrommars' is a rogue cryptic crossword clue writing daemon?

Either that or he's truly barking.

Paris, 'cos even she makes more sense.

Like the N810, maybe?

http://europe.nokia.com/A4568578

Where have you got that figure from? It seems awfully low, it sounds more like the profit for the year, rather than royalty revenue.

...can we please re-visit this feature and the one by your 'esteemed colleague' to see which one got it right? My own view is that one of you has written an objective and thoughtful article and the other one has lost his objectivity to trolling and fanboy-dom.

Does this make Nokia like both IBM and M$? Hardware and OS in two hands of the same company?

Or does this make Nokia like Apple - Hardware and OS tightly controlled to produce pretty products?

Are these just false analogies, and the truth is that when a company gets this big, it needs to decide whether to remain all things to all people or divide and conquer?

This article points out that this is costing Nokia effectively nothing, as long as they keep at it for 8 years. So Nokia have spent nothing to rearrange its assets. This is just a corporate reshuffle in the strange world of mobiles (your end user is not your customer, your customer wants to kill you, your developers see the world beyond the walled garden and yearn for freedom - amirite?).

S40 is not Symbian OS.

Seeing as Nokia owns nearly half of Symbian and presumably gets a corresponding share of the profits wouldn't that make it something more like 16 years?

You may have been coding EPOC, I started on the Organiser II in both OPL and 6303 machine code to do more entertaining things like running devices in the top slot.

Provide a platform that combines the simple power of OPL with mobile phone facilities and there's very little that isn't possible.

Oh, and could we please have the Series 5 Agenda back? It's the only agenda app that actually did the job..

The article is based on incorrect figures. Check out Symbian's results for 2007:

http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2008/pr20089781.html

They made £179.1 million on royalties last year.

Sorry to tell you, but S40 isn't actually a symbian platform, if if S40v3 does an excellent job of monkeying the UI. Symbian support is S60, with S standing for Series. reason why I've had to pay for more expensive phones for the past few years, don't like giving up the Symbian powers...

Look at it this way.

I have a Nokia E90.

I got it because it had the largest keyboard and I tend to use my phone more for e-mail and some web surfing.

Its a nice platform, but the applications... well they work but lack the elegance one would expect.

So you have Nokia, selling a nice handset, but marginal apps.

By opening up Symbian, they're gambling that there will be a community that will first improve the OS, write more apps, and thus sell more handsets.

Their competition will come from those who already use Symbian and potentially Motorola. (More on Moto later). So there isn't any increase in competition by releasing Symbian as open source. It in fact makes the platform more competitive against Apple and Android.

Moto could be a wild card. With their shake up in management, any new management has the freedom to innovate and re-create their future handsets from the ground up.

Also note that Nokia has implemented Linux on some of their products. Think what could have happened if the N810 had a phone built in, and external storage capabilities....

Actually it's in virtually all Nokia phones (note I said "virtually", not "all"). S40 platform (that uses Symbian OS) is used in the low-end Nokia phones and has been for years.

I said DECENT keyboard, not half-arsed mobile phone push pad. And yes, Agenda please.

Series 5 Agenda... now yer talkin'. Try setting the Beaconsfield Farmers' Market (which is the fourth Saturday of every month) as a recurring appointment on S60 calendar. It can't be done, yet was piss-easy with Agenda. You have to go and buy a third-party calendar like Handy Calendar. Joe User does not want to faff about like that.

S40 is not on SymbianOS. However, Symbian *is* currently finding its way into mid-range phones. The really daft thing though is that S40 is in some ways better than S60. It's the UIs that let down Symbian smartphones, not the underlying OS.

Nice to see the implications for S40 discussed here.

My guess: S40 can now be discarded.

If you want to make money off services/applications on mobile, you'd better have one platform. There is now a Nokia Maps for S40v5 - stupid, eh?

Plus, emerging markets will pick up internet wirelessly.

Now there is no need anymore to backport e. g. a good browser for S40.

Moore's law and Symbian Foundation partners TI and STM will deliver the means to sell a cheap S60 device then.

Oh - and the touch based interface does not need to be backported as well.

Mine is the coat with the pink slip for S40.

That's quite an accomplishment, no? I thought the first EPOC machines surfaced around 1990 (as a former MC400 user...). Not that I'm unaware that EPOC may have been developed beforehand, but not /much/ beforehand...

iPhone success has really made Nokia uncomfortable. Android is lurking but something which is not yet proven on market cannot be a deciding factor. Honestly.. Nokia phones are great but its GUIs experience are rather on 'allright' side than on the 'Wow' side. iPhone's first wave certainly has 'Wow' attached to it. So opening up Symbian by putting few hundered million is certainly a worth gamble for them(a more than 50billion$ company). Availabilty of thousands of Symbian application on existing SDKs is not going to accelerate the sales for a long time. What Nokia must be hoping that opening up of Symbian would really kick the innovation at the Symbian core and somewhere somehow someone would come up with a really 'Wow' for them.

-nutsnduts

I must be missing something here, but aren't all these years-of-royalty calculations missing the point that Nokia has payed the 'royalty advance' but still needs to pay the salaries of all their new Symbian employees? Previously they handed out the cash and Symbian distributed (much/some of) it to the staff.

Or maybe they don't plan on having any new symbian developers, since the delighted and enthusiastic open source community will be doing all the future work.

Actually, is there going to be any open source, or just a royalty free platform?

Very interesting article, and a nice backwards and forwards on the comments.

... anyone know where I can buy a phone, just a phone?

"... anyone know where I can buy a phone, just a phone?"

Tangent.

I had the same dilemma at Christmas - my old handset was getting flaky, and nothing in Woolies/CPW/Argos [I was in Scarborough, hence the huge choice!] caught my eye - too much money for cheap tat, or vastly expensive for something nice. I don't do contracts, y'see.

Popped into the second hand phone shop that used to be in the marketplace, now just outside it. One Sony Ericcccssssooon K310i for £20, boxed, mint condition bar a small scratch on the back.

No muss, just something that can make calls, send texts [and MMS if I am feeling flash - it has a basic camera that's good enough for snapping black Ferrari Testarossas clearly from twenty feet], last a few days on standby and is unlocked..

Take a few tenners to your local second hand phone shop, browse around, find something solid and simple, and drop a SIM in.

Sorted.

Just dont use eBay - every person I have seen try to buy or sell phones on there has horror stories...at least if the phone shop rips you off, you can go back and give them a bollocking.

Steven R

I beleive the correct for on EL Reg is to politly ignore our friend from Mars and pretend he is just a normal poster -- rather like treating the loony on the bus as just another passenger.

There are a couple of exceptions, for instance it's OK to solicit his valubale opinion if he has not already posted a comment on an article.

The difficult choice comes when you read a comment from the differently planeted which makes sense. This is a purly personal matter some posters comment in amazment that he psoted something which makes sense, some posters just increase thier medication, some seek counseling, and, in rare cases apply for jobs as press officers to the Labour Party.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Trolltech. Where is Nokia's OS/software-platform interest focussed, across the range of their devices? -- i guess perhaps should remember they do make more than just phones -- And how does Qtopia weigh up against Symbian in their looking-to-the-future eyes.

It always seemed to me taht buying up trolltech was an indicator of their interest in pushing out more qt/qtopia handsets.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/28/nokia_acquires_trolltech/

>I must be missing something here, but aren't all these years-of-royalty calculations >missing the point that Nokia has payed the 'royalty advance' but still needs to pay the >salaries of all their new Symbian employees? Previously they handed out the cash and >Symbian distributed (much/some of) it to the staff.

I believe Nokia has been looking for good developers, technical architects etc. as they are continuing to grow ... this way they have increased their development team by over 1,000 people without having to do a single interview, read a single CV or pay a recruitment firm ...

... previously Symbian (after starting with big cash injections from all the partners) has been making a profit on royalty payments and so has been paying their own staff, putting cash in the bank and reinvesting in expansion (hiring new people, opening new offices, buying in technology etc.) ... so yes, I expect this will cost Nokia something ... but it's also an investment (as is buying most companies) that Nokia reckons is going to make it money ... I'm sure they think having more developers and a single UI (plus the open source aspects) will mean they will be able to get new phones out quicker/cheaper and with the features people want .. and so they'll sell more phones (or as Nokia seems to ilke calling them "handheld devices/multimedia computers/mobile devices" ... and many of the big handset manufacturers reckon that higher functionality mobile devices (camera/email/web/phone/maybe TV/mp3 player) is the growth area of the market (people who just want "a phone" are paying very little for such, and there's lots of competition, so there's not a lot of profit unless you can sell many many millions of them, as Nokia have done and will probably continue to do with S40) ... but the bigger profit is there in mid-range and feature phones. And that's where the Symbian Foundation OS will come in.

>Or maybe they don't plan on having any new symbian developers, since the delighted >and enthusiastic open source community will be doing all the future work.

Could be! But as the open source isn't coming until 2010, I think Symbian employees will probably have a job until then :-)

>Actually, is there going to be any open source, or just a royalty free platform?

You really need to read other things than just The Register. Symbian Foundation initially will be providing a royalty-free platform for foundation members (currently costs $1,500 to join) and is committed to releasing an open source version (once everything has been combined in and the various IP is sorted out) in, I believe, 2010 ... it's all on the Symbian Foundation website ...

"and, in rare cases apply for jobs as press officers to the Labour Party." ... By James Anderson Posted Thursday 26th June 2008 07:11 GMT

Oh dear, as bad as that, eh. The Cabinet Office and the Strategy Unit are no strangers to Virtualisation and Quantum Communications Technology just apparently, blissfully ignorant of ITs Relentless March through Closed Administrations, which invariably are being Systematically Abused. That is a Vulnerability which Renders them Unfit for Future Purpose.