04 June 2009

Interview Symbian's Research Chief
Smartphone King Symbian Ready To Strike Back

In an interview with CNET News.com last week, David Wood, Symbian Foundation’s "catalyst and futurist" talked about new open-source strategy aimed at making the Symbian OS stronger amid completely new market realities, including the success of Apple and RIM, and Google's launch of Android, a license-free, open-source operating system for mobile phones. Not to mention forthcoming Palm Pre, with its new Web OS, which will further increase competition on the Smartphone market.

He also explained the influence Nokia is likely to have on the Symbian OS and revealed that the company itself has no plans for its own app store, but explained how Symbian plans to make it easier for developers to negotiate with several stores, like the Nokia Ovi Store, which got off to a bumpy start last week. On Tuesday, a developer's Web site for the new open-source Symbian went public.

However, first of all he made it clear that the U.K.-based company now is growing aggressively, with the expansion happening largely at its Foster City, Calif., office. "We have 72 employees today and intend to grow to a bit less than 200," he said. "Many will be in the Silicon Valley, in part to tap into the skills here."

Symbian was founded in the U.K. in 1998 by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita, and Motorola, basically as the mobile industry's defense against Microsoft. David Wood has been at the company from the start. Before that, he spent 10 years at Psion, whose operating system Epoc was the base for Symbian OS. Until now, global mobile phone leader Nokia has been Symbian's main proponent. But Nokia hasn't quite figured out how to make the masses download applications, as Apple did.

"I admire Apple for their advertising," Wood said. "They're actually teaching people about applications. Apple has done a tremendous job." "But we won't create a store," Wood said. "There won't be a single store for all kinds of devices that run Symbian software, because some operators and some manufacturers want to have their own store."

"The worst drawback is for developers who must negotiate with many different stores. So we're going to provide a single publishing route so that an application that meets certain criteria will automatically be available from any of these app stores."