
Nokia buys Symbian, turns software over to Symbian Foundation - chaostheory
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/24/nokia-buys-symbian/
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tdavis
I love reading stuff like this.

"Okay we're going to acquire you then immediately release all the IP we just
bought to a NP to turn it into OSS"

Of course it's a smart move for Nokia and they're not doing it out of the
kindness of their hearts, but at least it shows they're not, well, _stupid_.

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pavelludiq
Wow, Nokia learns fast :D I said, in the tread about open source developers
who need to be reeducated, that Nokia is the one which needs to be reeducated
and they were smart enough to do it. Cool. Imagine apple doing that :D

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mtw
imho top management at nokia still have the same position. for me, this is
just PR, they're still control freaks

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pavelludiq
How many companies open source their products out of good will? Motives are
not that important, results are. I'm curious about the results and don't care
about the motives.

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pmjordan
Is Nokia getting cold feet from all this excitement about Android and other
open source mobile phone platforms? RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than
Nokia in the smartphone market, which, as far as I know, is pretty much the
only part of the mobile phone market that's expanding in the developed world.

This move kind of puts into perspective their recent comments about how the
mobile phone industry works differently from the open source world. Doesn't
look like they have much confidence that that will be true for much longer.

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danw
_"RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market"_

That's a bit silly. As of Q4 2007 Nokia has 52.9% of market share for
smartphones, part of the 65% for Symbian. RIM has 11.4% and Apple has 6.5%
(impressive for only a year after launch). See
<http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm>

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DanielH
They have a 6,5% share in Q4 and not overall, basically all those numbers out
there only mention quarters and not overall market shares and that's very
misleading. I have seen this on Techcrunch and many other blogs, where they
put out 20% market share for the iPhone but if you consider there to be some
300 Mio. smartphones out there you get the real numbers ;).

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Tichy
Could you clarify please?

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DanielH
Apple sold 6 Mio. iPhones till June and the whole smartphone market is about
300 mio. phones, that's 2%.

The percentages mentioned on Techcrunch and all the other blogs mention
selling figures per quarter. e.g. 35,522,360 smartphones sold in Q4 and
2,320,840 iPhones that means only 6,5% in this quarter and not in the whole
market. I think it was 26% in Q1 2008 and 19% in Q2 2008 but as you see their
market share is still only approximately 2% of all smartphones.

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danw
Are those US or global figures?

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DanielH
26% and 20% were US figures, that was a little mixed up I think - sorry. The
rest was global.

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rcoder
So, at this point, Nokia has invested time, money, and/or developers in the
following platforms:

Mimeo (Linux, Gtk+ shell) Qtopia (Linux, Qt shell) Symbian (Symbian kernel and
shell)

Tell me again how this looks like a reasonable strategy? If I'm a smartphone
application developer, which platform(s) am I going to target? The _three_
incompatible APIs supported by Nokia, or the three APIs which will get me onto
every other major device on the planet: Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Mobile
Cocoa?

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akd
It may be too little too late. Symbian is dead on the smartphone right now,
but Nokia's iron grip on the mobile phone market is going nowhere. It will
need a complete tear-down and rebuild, and quick, to be effective.

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LogicHoleFlaw
I was shocked to see that DoCoMo (Japan's dominant mobile telephony provider)
is contributing to this effort. They are infamously proprietary.

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zandorg
It's good to see a British technology doing so well, when just about
everything else has been Americanised.

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akd
Finnish?

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zandorg
Symbian is a spin-off off Psion, a British company founded by Brit Potter.

