27 July 2008

Weekend Reading Part II
Nokia has no plans to merge Symbian with Android

Just in case you were wondering, despite yesterday’s predictions by analysis firm J. Gold Associates, official reaction from the mobile giants aren't positive so don’t expect union between Symbian, Nokia, and Google anytime soon!!

Nokia is not about to roll its Symbian mobile operating into Google's Android and Nokia has "no plans" to combine its efforts with Android, said David Rivas, a Nokia vice president, at a TechCrunch event today.

"We don't comment on market rumors or speculations," said a Google spokesperson and dismissed prediction as a "rumor"!

From other hand, few days ago, Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford said that Symbian would be glade to collaborate with Google, even "on the more fundamental operating system level." Pretty confusing situation I know and it is really hard to predict anything. I certainly didn’t expect that Nokia will spend $400 million on Symbian and than make it open source and offer it for free!?!?

To be completely honest I don’t believe in such scenario especially not that Nokia and Google would start fusing their operating systems into one project within six months!! From strongly technical point of view Android is Linux based platform. Symbian and Linux are totally different and there's no real way to easily combine the code of one Linux based platform with Symbian that is based on completely different conception and code base.

Last but not the least, as the Symbian owner Nokia is important factor in whole story and considering their intention to reinvent itself and switch from being a handset vendor only to being an "Internet Company".

CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said few weeks ago: "Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively."

In short, Nokia wants to venture into the online content service industry, which brings it near to Google’s territory and therefore we are closer to new cold war than to the cooperation between them.