

Android, Symbian Expected To Become One OS - ideas101
http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209600592

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SwellJoe
Is this even a realistic technical goal? I was under the impression that
Symbian was a pretty dramatically different technology than Android. Symbian
is a C++ platform from top to bottom (as far as I know), while Android is a
Linux+Java platform with not a lick of C++ to be found anywhere (again, as far
as I know).

I'm having a hard time imagining how the two could combine in any meaningful
way. One project or the other would have to move to the other platform, losing
the majority of their existing work. If Google wanted to do that, they would
have been the ones to acquire Symbian. If Nokia wanted Java, they would have
acquired RIM (or did what Google did and hire the lead developer of the
Sidekick and set him loose with more resources and orders to produce the next
generation platform for mobile).

The fact that a lot of the same companies are backing both projects is a null
statement. Of course they are! They want to be able to offer whichever one
takes off, the moment there is consumer demand. They also want to appear to
support open platforms (even if they're a little nervous about the idea).

It's going to be a competitive landscape for the foreseeable future, and
that's fine. iPhone needs some serious competition, and the only way to
compete with something like iPhone is to go the opposite direction on some
major point. In this case, iPhone is a thoroughly closed platform--everything
goes through Apple, or it goes nowhere--and so the smart money among
competitors is going into an open platform. Which one wins isn't really all
that important to them...they just need reasonable plans for taking on the
iPhone.

~~~
wmf
It's about as realistic as merging Mach, FreeBSD, NeXTSTEP, and Mac OS. It was
done, but it took years, cost a lot, and left a lot of legacy crap in the
system.

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philmcn
This is good news for everyone. As the iPhone OS takes off, Google and Nokia
will be free to create a strong contender to this.

