Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Symbian

Symbian Finished 2011 Stronger Than It Started This Past Year

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:26:46 +0000

Symbian, the mobile operating system that is currently maintained by Accenture, had actually finished 2011 stronger than it started in the past year. Symbian is still the number one mobile operating system, which is ahead of Android, iOS, BlackBerry, etc. Below is a chart that tracks the figures of the mobile operating system market share put together by Pingdom.

Symbian had started and finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system. They went from 30.25% in January to 33.59% in December. Even though Apple is making the most profits in the mobile industry, but iOS’ market share has been pretty flat in 2011. Google’s market share jumped from 14.61% to 22.56% in December. BlackBerry OS tanked as it went from 15.03% to 7.86%

Symbian Is Shutting Down Their Website and Online Code Distribution On December 17

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 18:21:02 +0000

The Symbian Foundation said that they are shutting down their websites and the online distribution of their source code as of December 17, 2010. Nokia will be taking over the development of Symbian and will package code either on DVD drives or USB drives that developers need to order through them. A packaged kit is not expected to arrive until January 31st and there may be a shipping cost associated with it.

Nokia’s decision to limit access to Symbian is said to have been influenced by Samsung and Sony Ericsson’s decision to stop using the Symbian operating system. Some Symbian content databases will be available through e-mail requests as well.

[Electronista]

WordPress Launches Application For Nokia Symbian^3

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:36:44 +0000

WordPress has launched an application for Nokia Symbian^3. This is the fourth largest mobile platform that the blogging company launch an app for after launching on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The application was written in Qt, which means that it will work on the Nokia N8, The Nokia C7, and the Nokia C6-01. Features include the ability to post on the go, moderate comments, check statistics, and photo uploading. [IntoMobile]

Symbian Receives €22 Million From Initiative Sponsored By European Commission

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 21:25:04 +0000

Even though Symbian is being dropped from mobile device companies left and right, the European Commission wants the company to keep up with the development of the operating system. The initiative, sponsored by the EC and endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, advocates Symbian as a unique technology that is necessary for European-centric mobile software development. This resulted in over €22million in funding for the Symbian platform. The development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation and includes 24 organizations across 8 countries in Europe. The consortium of these organizations is being called SYMBEOSE (Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe). [Symbian Blog]

Symbian Executive Director Lee Williams Resigns For “Personal Reasons”

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:14:56 +0000

Lee Williams, the executive director at Symbian has left the company for “personal reasons.” Before Symbian, Williams worked at Motorola and Palm. Williams is being replaced by Symbian CFO Tim Holbrow. Williams’ departure comes at a time when Samsung has ended their support for the mobile operating system and Nokia announced that the N8 will be the last Symbian-powered N Series Device. [Engadget]

Samsung Ends Support For Symbian

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:34:17 +0000

Samsung has sent out an e-mail to registered developers that they will be closing the Symbian forums and will be removing all Symbian content by the end of the year. Samsung has been busy working on their Bada operating system to replace Symbian. Symbian is one of Nokia’s mobile open source operating systems for mobile devices and smartphones. According to a Gartner report from 2009, Symbian accounted for about 46.9% of smartphone sales. [Engadget]

Nokia N8 Will Be The Last Symbian-Powered N Series Device

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:12:29 +0000

Nokia is transitioning towards ending the N Series Symbian-powered devices. Nokia is preparing to grow MeeGo after the N8 introduction. Symbian will continue to remain around and Symbian^4 is on the way. [Engadget]

Samsung SVP Don Joo Lee Says Symbian Will Be Dropped For Bada Next Year

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:07:18 +0000

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.

The Mobile App Market Will Be As Big As The Internet

Shan Sadiq — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:06:32 +0000

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.

Via

Nokia Corporation Is Borrowing $640 Million From European Investment Bank To Enhance Symbian

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:42:20 +0000

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.

[via Fierce Wireless]