Symbian Votes for Open Mobile System 

Of late, leading mobile players led by Nokia have decided to form Symbian Foundation that will offer royalty-free open platform for mobile ecosystem. My Techbox Online asked David Wood, executive VP (Research), Symbian about the future course of action. He answers in a detailed interview. Excerpts: 

How the proposed Symbian Foundation going to help consumers at large?

The Symbian Foundation will increase and accelerate the availability of new services and experience, with innovations built on mature platform solutions. It will also enable easier access to more services and appealing devices addressing all consumer needs from multiple vendors.  
 
When will this Foundation see the light of day or will start functioning?

The Foundation’s launch is planned for the first half 2009. The first release of the unified Symbian Foundation platform is expected to be available during 2009. The platform will offer the means to build a complete mobile device while providing the tools to differentiate devices through tailoring of the user experience, applications, and services. This will enable device manufacturers to create unique devices, based on a consistent and common platform, providing fuel and scale for the innovation of others.

What are the immediate challenges that it'd face and how do you plan to overcome them?

During both the preparatory period before its launch, and the initial period of operation of the Foundation, it may be a challenge to ensure that we in Symbian honour existing roadmap commitments of Symbian OS technologies and releases, as well as commitments of support to individual customer projects, whilst working in parallel on planning the first release of the Symbian Foundation platform.  Our standards of "business as usual" must be maintained, with predictable delivery of quality software, even as we prepare for a new world of even faster delivery of even more software. Our approach to deal with this challenge is to plan carefully and to allow plenty of time for this transition.

How is it going to be different from Google-led Open Handset Alliance or Android initiative?

The Symbian Foundation is built on years of development experience on a proven, stable, complete, and mature operating system.  About 206 million smartphones have already shipped on Symbian OS, in 235 different handset models worldwide. We are unable to comment on the Google-led initiatives. But we note that no Android phones are available today in the market.

What kind of demand do you foresee for open mobile platforms?

Mobile phones, whether high-end or for mass market, are growing in demand and popularity. Consumers and business people alike are increasingly realising that the right mobile phones can provide numerous valuable and useful services in addition to voice and text. Network operators such as Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile have been asking the industry to reduce complexity and focus on fewer operating systems, and to move away from closed operating systems. The Symbian Foundation decisively answers these requests by creating the most complete open platform, established as an independent industry standard for advanced phones.

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