Samsung plans Symbian-free future
Oh my god, it's full of widgets
Samsung's roadmap includes Windows mobile, Android and its new Bada platform, but there's no sign of Symbian in the plan.
The details come from Samsung VP Don Joo Lee, who told Digitimes that the company would be giving up on Symbian to focus on Android, Windows Mobile and Bada-based handsets, in its continuing campaign to supplant Nokia as the world's biggest mobile phone company.
That campaign has been running for a few years now, and the company reckons it will ship 200 million phones in 2009. Nokia should ship around 100 million more than that in the same period, but Samsung is becoming a contender.
Samsung phones won't be Symbian based: they'll be using Android for high-end consumers and retaining Windows Mobile as it still has the edge in the enterprise, while the new Bada platform will fill that mid-range feature-phone market.
We still don't know a lot about the Bada platform, but it seems likely it will support widget-based applications in much the same way as Palm's Pre - AJAX extended using OMTP's BONDI or the forthcoming W3C specifications. Such applications should run on all three platforms, making the underlying OS less important than ever.
All of which spells bad news for Symbian: with Nokia's lacklustre support for the platform in the high end and Samsung pulling out completely, it's hard to see a future for the smartphone platform, despite its existing domination of the market. ®
COMMENTS
Already retracted by Samsung...
And of course it was all a misunderstanding and Samsung has already retracted the rumour about Symbian.
In other rumours it is suspected that bada is just a version of the Touchwiz interface.
Ok linux geeks....
please tell me, they say Maemo is a Debian liux, does that mean that I can just get any debian software(eg many browsers, graphic editors, etc..) and install it on a N900??
QT
I actually like this multi-platform GUI environment. It has been the only C++ GUI that I've found easy to learn and use, and was my main platform before I took on Java.
Development for BlackBerry OS is with Java, so it doesn't look weird. WinMo is C#/:NET I suppose (whoever still uses VB should be shot on sight) and I suppose that the Linux-based offers are C++ based (especially those using QT) so it isn't too hard to learn on these ones.
iPhone requires that Smalltalk-wannabe ObjC, but then again, some devs have actually started learning that as well, but the learning curve might be steep for those used to C-like languages.
@Paul Brain
Why bother?
Presumably so that when they tie up a massive deal with MS to bundle all their web apps they can have a Goodfellas style Bada Bing! ad campaign.
what's the point of another new OS
Why bother creating another Linux based OS, when there is Android ? , The beauty of Android is that we'll end up with Mobile phone operating environment convergence ( with the exception of iPhone )
I don't understand why Samsung would go to the effort to re-invent the wheel, when there is already a free and rapidly developing environment ?
