Symbian Blasts Google's Phone Initiative 276
nowhere.elysium writes "Symbian has suggested that Google is not experienced enough or capable of fully developing a workable mobile platform. Symbian's vice president, John Forsyth inferred that Google's interest in the field will also wane due to it being 'deeply unsexy', and that development is not likely for such a platform because "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed."
In the same series of statements, Linux is likened to the common cold: "About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It's a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business.""
First step for symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. First they ignore you (Linux? What is that? Who cares?).
2. They ridicule you (Linux is like cancer. Linux is un-American)
3. Then they fight you. (Our ROI is so much better and we have a roadmap too!)
4. Then you win
It will happen to you to symbian!!
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I've always thought Symbian should merge with Sybian.
You'd get a phone that'd be a pleasure to receive calls on.
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No one cared but the project is kinda moving forward with a couple of Linux phones also being available.
Now Google announce the same thing (which is probably how we ended up with 350+ Linux distros in the first place). now, Google is much larger and has more resources so I suppose next week w
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I would estimate that linux is more prevalent in the cell phone market than in the desktop market, so you're likely backwards here.
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux. Linux runs on various other embedded devices as well. Linux is big in the server arena, especially for cheap web hosting and such. Very big operations (Google, Akamai, etc) run massive amounts of Linux boxes.
The desktop will get there eventually. I hear more and mor
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft does desktop, for the most part. In this, they are enjoying comfortable domination based on their success with XP, and have some time to turn around from the failures in Vista.
My point is simply that he's got it backwards- the cell phone market is much more promising for linux than desktop, at this point. Linux will really rely on the death of the classic PC market to enjoy total market "domination"-- or permeation, if you will- Microsoft is more vulnerable to the linux-based device market overtaking PC's than linux taking the PC market- if you're just arbitrarily anti-Microsoft you might like the see the captain go down with his ship, in this case.
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Microsoft seems to be having trouble coming up with a good reason for a new Windows version. IMO, the last Windows version that was good was Win2K. There's some point where an operating system, or any application for that matter, really does all it's supposed to do.
Once you get to that point, ther
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I think at this point, the DRM debate is really not about the companies vs. the consumers- just look at the WGA strike. Writers are demanding a very complex set of royalties for new media online play, etc- their demands are beginning to underline a re
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No. I don't support DRM, period.
If it uses DRM, I don't buy it or use it. If it even supports DRM (po
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There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux
I hate to break it to you, but A) the WRT54G isn't an access point, it's a NAT router that happens to have an AP built into it and B) the new versions DON'T run Linux, they use vxworks. Presumably Cisco wasn't very impressed by being forced to release their code and opted for a solution that they could control better.
They still release a version that runs Linux and can be flashed easily -- the WRT54GL -- but it's not nearly as mainstream by any means.
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You're clutching at straws here. It works as a WiFi AP, and that's what matters.
What is this "their code"? An access point that runs Linux has a kernel and software the vast percentage of which
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The "zealots" are merely sticking to their principles in order to achieve a goal. Why do you feel the need to sneer at them?
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Symbian must have some sand in their Bajingos (Score:2)
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Nokia did a "internet tablet" some years back with linux, and were surprised to find that tons of people are porting software for it (or writing new stuff) - much more than for any of their symbian platforms.
It's not always about revenue. The only platform that I know of that is more hostile towards developers than symbian is brew. Go and check the hoops you have to j
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Uhh.. what?
The SDK is a free download. How is that hostile?
You can program in standard C or C++. How is that hostile?
Compared to some platforms it's positively open.
bunk (Score:2, Informative)
And no! Standard C++ is not supported! It's Symbianized C++, with a stupid proprietary try/catch model that forced the developer to push object onto a cleanup stack, which COMPLETELY destroys the possibility of clean, platform-independent code.
Worst of all, many API's are proprietary Nokia information, and require some kind of business deal with Nokia.
Nokia would do well to continue down their current
Re:Symbian must have some sand in their Bajingos (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you actually try to develop anything for Symbian?
Well, I did. And let me tell you this: Windows APIs, complete with their haphazard organization and historical baggage, lunatic bugs and arcane undocumented extensions are an example of Reason and Logic, when compared to this positive 10 day old vomit which is Symbian. Any ole Linux API is like an Extatic Symphony of Cosimic Joy, Eternal Purity and All-Encompassing Sanity, next to this 10 day old vomit which is Symbian.
Hell, I am being unfair to 10 day old vomit.
You gotta be a masochist to develop for this thing, downloadable "api" or not.
The toolchain is fucked up beyond belief.
The API is a convoluted mess of overcomplicated certinisms, wheels reinvented to be square and with an offset axis, said square "wheels" within other square "wheels", and all existing only so that Symbian "alliance" can have NDAs, Patents and what not on this shit, which otherwise has been done a million times before, some 900 thousand times of which done much better.
Great majority of it is undocumented or laughably documented (they want you to pay big money for access to the "real" stuff). Most of what is documented you do not want go near.
The OS itself was designed by a brain-damaged monkey, its like a retarded dwarf cousin of Windows, complete with moronic "drive letters" and whole bunch of other truly imbecillic "features" from the early days of DOS, which even Microsoft doesn't want anymore.
You gotta pay money for application certs.
On and and on and on.
Or and did I mention that there is like 6 mutually incompatible versions of the thing in the wild, and about 8 different, mutually incompatible of course, versions of the "ui" deployed on various phones?
One way to gauge of the levels of insanity is the fact that there are a grand total of 4 (to my knowledge) languages ported to this thing, NONE of which has anything resembling something like a useful set of bindings to the Symbian API (Java, which is the only remotely usable one, has a very limited MIDP profile). Ponder that!
In short: do pay good coin for those downloadable Symbian-specific apps if you need them, because their developers have all been through Hell several times to make them.
What really kills me though is how arrogant and pompous the "designer" of this pile of pig manure about this monumental "achievment". Another, mind boggling observation is that there actually cell phone manufacturers using it.
"Deeply Unsexy" (Score:3, Insightful)
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2. Free developer certificates work fine.
You don't have to get your app signed by a 'test house' you sign your apps yourself using your companies' cerficicate.
Plus you can access files and use the network and other stuff like GPS with a standard developer certificate... heck I've even written stuff that does that myself. What you can't do with the dev certs is mess around with the
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Thank you for letting me know which brand of phone to not buy, should the Neo1973 fail to materialize this Christmas.
Whoops (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... A bit of complacency there too.
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In that case... (Score:5, Interesting)
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but google was caught demonstrating age discrimination, and so.... yes..... the developers there HAVE to be young or they get fired.
link for brian reid and other 'older people' who have gotton the shaft at google:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html [zdnet.com]
do no evil, huh? bloody LIARS, they are. war is peace, right? 'do no evil' is an unfunny joke.
A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing like building a big wall around yourself, then complaining that nobody ever comes to visit.
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Both offer full TCP/IP access last time I checked. Even the Blackberry now offers access to the TCP/IP in their SDK.
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You said "If", that implies that there are no phones with that are easy to develop for. Just pointing out that there are phones already do have a easy to access SDK. As far as I can tell they are not Open as in the FOSS use of Open but they are easy to develop for.
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That's a totally false statement regarding symbian. I downloaded their sdk yesterday from Nokia's site. Free as in beer, but it's easy to get. There are quite a few apps for symbian already and the sdk looks pretty well documented. I think there's an OPL runtime for symbian too.
and distribution licenses with the carriers.
In symbian's case, you don't need to go to the carrier. It's another reason why their OS is years ahea
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Bulshit. The development certs. are free. The SDK is free.
There are many, many thousands of symbian developers and many many thousands of independent symbian apps.
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You pay for the certificate if you want to start distributing commercial apps. That's no more cost than you would pay for a signing certificate on Windows for example and if you can't recover that cost how are you paying your devs in the first place? You do *not* have to submit the app for testing once your company has a certificate, as the signing application is part of the SDK. We actua
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why mobile development is in such a bloody mess. Phone vendors do not want phones to become a portable application platform. You can port your phone number when you change carriers, but they'd sure as hell prefer you to lose as much else as possible, for example your phone book and applications, and if possible the phone itself. I expect this is why J2ME is not offered in the same way as J2SE; the phone companies would do their best to kill if it looked like it was emerging as a platform which freed mobile applications from carrier control.
There's nothing really all that special about mobile development. Devices are resource constrained, but in the grand historical sense they aren't all that constrained, when compared to a 286 PC/AT machines from which many an entrepreneur made his fortune. User interfaces are different, but not in a way that a smart designer (who can be hired for a fee) can't take into account. Believe me, I've done it, and while it is easy to make stupid mistakes, it's not really that hard to avoid those mistakes if you have enough money.
And it's not like mobile applications are, in the current state of the art, all that wonderful.
The real problem is overcoming the phone companies. Google is in an interesting strategic position, because they have so much money, they've got huge amounts of mysterious dark fiber, they're making noises about being interested in acquiring spectrum. Maybe they'd have a hard time becoming a mobile phone company, but they could become a mobile something else company and by the way pretty soon that something else does the things you use your phone for now.
Smart people at the mobile companies should be concerned that Google's involvement in mobile technology, if not co-opted, could lead to a paradigm shift. At least in the US, the companies aren't prepared for that kind of competition. They aren't even prepared for fair competition in their existing business. They do their level best to make it hard for consumers to price compare services.
So, Google is in a position that Symbian might well envy. Symbian is a captive of the phone companies. If the phone companies don't want to play with them, there goes their business. If they don't want to play with Google, it has almost no effect on Google's main business, and Google goes back to the lab and cooks up a world of pain for them.
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Here at Brazil most operators sell their phones without any features disabled, for an example I can upload any application to my phone using an microSD card, also after one year all operators must unlock your phone for free. I think this happens on other countries too.
So, even if this Google initiative fails at the USA... it can succed at the rest of the world.
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Informative)
It will cost to buy a certificate to certify the app as non-malicious and fit for purpose, and without that the user will get a warning when installing that the app is unsigned. But that is a quite reasonable security step given that phone malware could cost serious money on a phone bill. But the lack of such a cert doesn't stop you from using or distributing free apps.
[Citation needed] (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a developer discussing forthcoming signing options [newlc.com], which he views as friendlier to developers. All of them are gated. Installation on more than one device requires payment. Some capabilities require payment; some also require permission from the device manufacturer.
More developer discussion. [allaboutsymbian.com] Even "passive content" has to be signed.
Another developer. [antonypranata.com] The current process is "very painful". The new process has "no real plan" for freeware and FOSS.
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http://www.forum.nokia.com/ [nokia.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_platform [wikipedia.org]
-Chris
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Symbian is not as much of a cost problem, however that is the only good thing I can say about it.
While I have not worked much on Symbian myself, the fact that we work for most available mobile
Mod Parent Wrong (Score:2)
That's a totally false statement regarding symbian. I downloaded their sdk yesterday from Nokia's site. Free as in beer, but it's easy to get. There are quite a few apps for symbian already and the sdk looks pretty well documented. I think there's an OPL runtime for symbian too.
and distribution licenses with the carriers.
In symbian's case, you don't need to go to the carrier. It's possible to imagine the carriers aren't very
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what he said - "supporting customers
"If you are a serious phone maker
But he does sound a touch envious of the lifestyles of those at Google - describing his own work as "a deeply unsexy job". Aww...
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Symbian v Google (Score:4, Funny)
PR stories on slashdot = lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, to have a CEO call the mobile field "deeply unsexy" in an attempt to make the public think Google doesn't fit into it implies that he and his company are deeply concerned about Google entering the mobile platform market and shaking it up! As for "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed," he's implying that it will take a long time to be profitable. However, I think Google has "a lot [more] zeroes" in its market capitalization and R&D budget than Symbian and many other companies combined. Thus Symbian's fear that Google will get into mobile devices.
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No he means that he believes a lot of phones must ship before any developers get interested in a phone. A phone with only a few customers using it is not that interesting for a developer when there are phone that have millins of users.
So, he is alluding to chicken/egg. Does a developer wait for enough devices to ship, or does he take a p
So what? They're not doing it alone. (Score:5, Insightful)
John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian, the platform that powers many of the world's phones, said Google lacked experience.
Google has formed an alliance with 33 firms to develop an open platform for mobile phones, called Android.
Among those firms are phone giants HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung. Additionally, they're apparently courting Nokia, as well. I don't think that Google's inexperience in designing phones matters one bit. They've allied themselves with virtually every major mobile phone maker in the market. They don't *need* any experience within Google. They have it in spades with their partners.
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People who believe these operators are joining means much are naive. They could be joining to get advance notice of what is going on, perhaps commision one phone as a test in some back
Cold (Score:5, Insightful)
Lousy summary (Score:2)
But Symbian sucks (Score:2)
What kinda of operating system hides screen config options under the phone security menus?
Their whole UI seems to have been built by a randomisation script.
The technical background might be fine but when the user experience is so poor it just drags the whole experience down.
I own an Nokia N91, I'd add.
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Still, I think it could be easier, and I think feature creep has added a lot of deep menu chains, so I wish it were more customizable for the features I use. I know Sy
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Mine's in Tools > Settings > Display (6680). If you want to see a randomisation script in action, try Windows Mobile.
There are very few smartphone platforms out there. Apple's GUI might be arguably better but as a programmable platform it's left wanting (maybe in January we'll see something if Steve is kind enough to us mere mortals). Windows Mobile might have less hurdles with regards to certificates but the GUI is basically a 800x600 desktop crammed into a phone screen. There are Linux platforms b
It's like HR departments all over again.. (Score:2)
The amusing thing is that experience doesn't necessarily equate to aptitude. You have to get into the game somewhere, and in a few years, Google WILL have the experience. You don't stop paying attention to good ideas just because they don't come from someone with that 20 year history. A good idea is a good idea.
Besides, it's just the opinion of one company; w
then why is the iphone killing everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apple are newbies at the phone game and it really shows. They'll improve I'm sure.. there's nothing really wrong hardware wise with the iphone (battery life is poor but you can work around it).. its just needs a v2.0 software with all the bits they screwed up the first time around.
Google will pr
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Other than that Apple is really REALLY good at making software?
Underestimated, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its foolhardy to make such assumptions and reckless for an officer of Symbian to make such statements. How can you do anything but take Google seriously at this point?
If google says they are going to do it and they have the skills and the deep pockets needed to do it: so why not plan on it and have product in place to protect your own company from it?
Because its cheaper and easier to bury one's head in the sand than face the fact that you have real competition whose goal is to make money on advertising by giving away an open source OS. They don't even wish to compete in Symbian's turf, they want to make phones for the masses to get more advertising clicks. By executing this strategy they will make Symbian's entire business model obsolete.
So bury your heads Symbian, we'll bury the rest of you later.
Fools.
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They're supposed to say they're not worried about it, that's if they don't want to have their customers running for the hills.
They said the same about Apple but are building touch-screen control into the next version.
If Google actually specify anything about their platform I'm sure they'll build that in too. I'm sure it'll be faster for them to do that than it will be for Google to implement all the basics properly that are already in Symbian.
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What actually have we seen from Google that is commercially successful apart from search? For their monolithic size and supposedly cool creative environment, we haven't had much to show for it. Vast majority of their services are still in Beta! Outside of their core business of search and serving adverts, Google are doing nothing particularly special. Ye gods, they had to *buy* Youtube because Google Video was so poor!
Google analytics is putting the screws to a lot of analytics companies. They now either have to find something critical and new to offer, reduce their price, or increase their support. Analytics is as good enough for a lot of organizations.(click view source scroll to the bottom)
Google Maps grabbed a sizable amount of the market share of the online maps/directions market.
Google news is one of the best news aggregators on the net.
Google custom search put many smaller search tools for single site searches to
Show me the yachts... (Score:2)
Google may or may not succeed, but they have moved the industry - the OHA members in particular - a long way in the right direction.
They have to say something like this. (Score:5, Informative)
Symbian was formed and supported out of one single reason: Microsoft
The mobile phone makers, that used to hold a stake in Symbian (Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson each a quarter with Psion having the last quarter IIRC) bought the IP of Epoc from Psion and founded Symbian, because they were scared that Microsoft (with Windows Mobile) would attain the same dominance in the mobile phone market that it held in the PC market.
That danger is over and Symbian ownership has shifted around a bit. Also Microsoft did not yet become such a threat. I suppose that in the mobile phone market there is enough space for everyone. The numbers of units is much higher than in the PC market and it is still growing much faster. Apple just joined it btw. And even if they were to capture only 1% of the world market, they would make a huge profit from the huge amount of sales that this would mean in numbers.
Same with Google.
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Look at Nokia Tablets (Score:2, Interesting)
If Nokia tablets don't include a phone its probably because Nokia doesn't want to compete with their own NSeries. Why couldn't Google build something similar? They have the money, the best smart guys the money and reputation can buy, and don't need to compete with another device builders. Their are in another bus
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Why Phones Suck (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope Google does to mobile phones what it did to online search, maps and blogging: makes them work by finally providing some competition in the core function without being trapped in its box.
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I haven't seen one good Symbian phone (Score:2)
Why is that?
That's why Symbian is afraid. They know their product can't compete well enough on its own merits, and so they resort to disparaging others.
He completed his statement by pissing his pants... (Score:3, Funny)
Handhelds.org has been around for 8 years (Score:2)
The Bloviator vs. Reality (Score:2)
did anyone else read this as... (Score:3, Funny)
yikes
It's just this simple... (Score:2)
I read this as: Wow! Google will have new ideas!
And as: Symbian has run out of ideas. Pretty bad day to work for Symbian, or own Symbian stock as far as I can see.
Uh right. (Score:2)
Ummm....does this guy realize Google can walk into his office and double his developers' salaries and be "capable" in about 24hrs?
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a quick comparison. (Score:2)
google::sexy
the fat turkish dude works real hard, but he smells bad and wears the same clothes every day.
Deeply unsexy argument (Score:2)
Symbian is right, because of customer service (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Because quite simply, google sucks at customer service. And the OS business is all about customer service.
How do I know that google's customer service sucks? Simple: I've used them for things other than search. Have you ever tried to get a detailed sales report out of google checkout? You can't. You can ask about it, but it disappears into the void that is google checkout's customer service. Can they tell you if they're ever going to have reporting? Nope.
What does the sales report include? Dates, amounts, and state. What about customer names and addresses? Nope. What about anything else? Sorry.
Google's service philosophy is "help yourself." That doesn't help when you need features of a product that don't exist.
If google can't give you a useful sales report for the last month, how can they support a mobile phone launch?
The answer, of course, is they can't. Unless it's advertising-related, google can't concentrate for long enough to make a mature product...or they're too arrogant to listen. gmail still doesn't have folders, which is totally different than keywords (which is their 'justification'). Yeah, whatever.
That explains the buzz around the iPhone (Score:2)
I prefer working. (Score:2)
Neither was Apple (Score:2)
That's what everybody said about Apple and the iPhone, and we all see how that is working out. [informationweek.com]
Maybe, maybe not (Score:2)
No idea if what Google is doing will take off. I still haven't really figured out what they're doing (i.e. how open will a platform based on Google's stuff will really be).
But one thing's for sure, Symbian: your phones suck. They suck a lot. Many people want a phone that is better than anything that is on the market. They want it for different reasons:
how very bizare.. (Score:2)
Openmoko only seems to be gaining momentum, sure they're not "in your face" but that hardly means they're going away either.
The thing that bothers me is the way he talks about developers as the people porting the gphone software to a hardware device. But there's two set's of devel
SDK available here november 12th (Score:2)
Symbian (Score:3, Interesting)
But the fact that they are "the best" also indicates in what poor shape the mobile OS market is: Symbian is hard to develop for, it's sluggish, it has a dozen different and incompatible user interface versions, networking configuration is a mess, even simple operations require expensive and flaky shareware add-ons, there's no command line.
The worst part is, though, that Symbian's problems just don't get fixed. Symbian right now is where Palm was a few years ago: they have a large market share, but they are so arrogant that they don't see how troubled their OS actually is.
As for Google's experience, it appears that they hired a number of people from other mobile software companies, and in addition, Google has plenty of experience developing mobile applications for Blackberry, Java, Symbian, and iPhone. I suspect, overall, Google probably has many more man-years experience with mobile development than Symbian's entire staff.
(*) Internally, iPhone is actually better, with its UNIX-like kernel and real window system, but the fact that it limits what you can install and do makes it overall less useful than Symbian.
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I say try something new! Google has got the the bank to try something risky and "unsexy" and if it fails, move on knowing that it's core is still making money enough for their private landing strip...
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What no screen shots? No docs? Not even a pretty phone to look at? I mean who really cares until they show SOMETHING!
The Iphone is a nice IPod+browser+phone but until I can add real apps it isn't what I consider a smart phone.
I still have not seen this SDK apple said was coming.
Yea I have high hopes but I can understand those that are more than just a little annoyed at the hype.
Re:Competition. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Given that it's Google, there isn't even a beta to look at... But this is Google at its finest -- stirring up a hornet's nest, dropping hints and outright misdirections, then rolling out there own thing like they're surprised anyone had ever heard of it or knew it was coming. It certainly generates buzz.
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After all Google hasn't hit eveyone out the park.
GTalk which is the only IM I use is not all that popular.
Docs and Calc while nice little programs have not replaced Office or Openoffice.
It could be really cool. Google has loads of money and talent so they have the potential to do great things.
I will say one more time. THEY HAVE SHOWN NOTHING YET. So I will go into wait and see mode.
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http://www.symbiantutorial.org/symbian-tutorial/?3._Symbian_Fundamentals:3.1_Console_Application [symbiantutorial.org]
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Handsets, handsets and handsets (Score:2)
Er... So long as Nokia is the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world and largest share holder in Symbian, Symbian is not going to die. Actually usage of Symbian is just going to increase as Nokia and other handset manufacturers are pushing Symbian into their middle to low price models.
It should also be noted that as most of the price of mobile phone comes from the design and manufacturing, and not from the software, mobile phone companies like Nokia can just kill their competition by leveraging the
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