Samsung Electronics will quit using Symbian in favor of their own in-house open operating system according to SVP Don Joo Lee. Samsung plans to continue using the Windows Mobile and Android operating systems too. This year Samsung shipped roughly 200 million mobile devices. This number is expected to increase by 10-20% in 2010.
Bada will support applications made by developers using Samsung’s software development kit. “Bada” means ocean in Korean. While details about a Bada application store has not been fleshed out, we do know that Samsung plans to integrate the Bada store will be integrated with their European app store.
Ilja Laurs, CEO of of GetJar, a top independent app store, said that apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. He said that the economics of mobile apps are a different story. According to him, roughly 90% of app developers fail. He says there are simply too many applications out at the time.
Apple’s App store now hosts over 65,000 applications. Its very hard to reach the top of a category when you are competing against that many apps. Most top selling iPhone apps are a one hit wonder. They get popular for a short time and then lose traction. So its becoming increasingly difficult to build a solid business model around the App store.
Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation thinks that that Apple’s current App store is flawed because its a mixed bag of apps. He feels that there are simply too many low quality apps in the store.
Google on the other hand feels that the App store is a fad. Google says that consumers will set their focus away from native mobile apps to browser based apps.
Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) is borrowing $640 million from the European Investment Bank as part of a five-year loan agreement to fund their software R&D projects. Nokia hopes that this investment will enhance Symbian-based smartphones. This loan will also benefit the Symbian Foundation and their contributions to open-source mobile software. About 78 companies have already pledged support to the Symbian Foundation including MySpace, Qualcomm, SanDisk, and Bank of America.
