Operating systems are all the hype in the PC world and lots of companies want to get a good market share within the wireless space, especially in the new smartphone category. Microsoft is pushing their Smart Phone operating system, Danger has developed a new OS for their Hiptop, Palm is throwing theirs into the playing field and of course there is Symbian. Developers have a lot to choose from.
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Palm will lead that market in the long run.
Symbian will come second.
ciao
yc
Oh god, I will rue the day I can run Office .NET on my cell phone.
Not necessarily any cell phone apps run on the phone itself. Most of the applications run on the gateway and then they get displayed on the phone. And as the 3G and 4G phones will come along, the LCDs will become a bit bigger as well, possibly running something like 320x320. So, it's not all bad.
PDA's these days don't even have 320x320 resolution. I can't imagine having a 320x320 screen on my cell phone, unless those pixels are mighty mighty tiny!
SONY sells a VAIO with 1280x600 resolution in just 8.9" of screen space and it is *perfectly crisp* (I have seen this model with my own eyes at Fry's - http://www.notebooktrade.com/products/Handhelds/Sony/VAIO_C1MV_Pict... ).
All it needs is the LCD screen to be of a good quality. 320x320 can be done on a cellphone. And even 320x480 can be done, if the decide to make the phone buttons as part of a touch screen instead of real buttons! So, that screen space can be used if someone is not using the actual phone capability, but is running another app.
Because it's endorsed by big and powerful companies. Who also happen to be united against coercive technological guggernauts (Microsoft).
Let's see:
- Nokia
- Sony Ericsson
- Motorola
- Siemens
- and the little guys (Kenwood, Psion, Sanyo).
Symbian's support of Java is very robust, and all these companies are churning Symbian applications all the time. In the long run, Symbian will become ubiquitous, it will be commoditized and I hope this will happen soon, because it's also the most open of the available technological mobile OS solutions.
Well, I looked at the *specs* for the symbian os, it looks quite nice. It appears to be a very powerful os that doesn't need multithreading(it sort of emulates it with clever callbacks i guess). This way it isn't quite as taxing on the cpu. But this is the lamer part, the cool thing about it is that they strive to be POSIX, so I'm guessing porting to symbian would be much like porting to BeOS..aka very simple. And since its a low-resource OS, it should prove to be a good choice.
PocketPC stuff on the other hand is bloated as all hell, has ugly ms APIs that ms like to shove into every one of their products, and of course its taxing on resouces.
The current palm os 3/4 kind of sucks, in what can be done with it(programming-wise its kinda limited), so I'm guessing palm will be pushing the beos-like palm os to fix that.
Of course there is linux too, but afaik its in the same boat as MS when it comes to efficency.
So far, the only one of the listed OSes is designed specificly for cell phones & it is backed by the most powerful cellphone manufacturers & it is nice to program. The os is symbian. There might be one issue with symbian & that is licensing, and initial lack of applications. it will be interesting to see how Nokia & friends will accomodate for that.
..is not 37 %, only about 34%. Still, a very impressive marketshare. The other numbers are about right.
Great article, bravo Oliver! I really enjoyed it.
Microsoft's problem is that their smartphone competes with their own PocketPC for apps. In PalmOS you can have many different form factors (treo, NR clie, alphasmart, regular Palm, etc) and they all run the same apps
> Microsoft's problem is that their smartphone competes with their own PocketPC for apps.
This won't be the case if they use .NET for everything. .NET is a virtual machine, so its apps run everywhere that there is support for this virtual machine.
..as neither is Java VM. The bread and utter of mobile devices are -native- applications. Written in some memory-efficient way. Bread and butter applications like microbrowser, phonebook, messenger. Imagine having to wait 30 seconds for a phonebook lookup, instead of 1 second. It makes all the difference in the world!
Nobody expects VMs to solve the application problems of any mobile OS platform. Or else you don't know the first thing of development for this kind of embedded systems.
What Java will provide to Symbian are a host of simple midlets and applets that are mostly text-based and perform simple, non-CPU intensive tasks. I've tried a couple, wasn't impressed. But it has it's use.
On the other hand, the Symbian applications developed by Nokia are very impressive. I hope MS tries to match it, 'cos comptetition is good. But it seems MS has nearly 0 experience with this kind of development. It'll be an uphill battle for them, for once. Ahhh, the pleasure of laying back and watch them sweak in pain :o) Expecially if MS makes the tragic mistake of relying on .NET for their main applications...
as neither is Java VM. The bread and utter of mobile devices are -native- applications
They are, most of the SmartPhones will come complete with java-running-procs, so there will not be a VM, as such just the run time env (Java.*), or atlest thats what I made out of the specs.
So Java will be nice and fast. Ohh, and remember Java developers, the J2ME does NOT define an AWT, so your'll have to learn a graphics lib for every system used. 
re: yc & tehehe
What makes you think that Palm with one product they released, will beat Symbian which has the backing of the phone "gaints", and has two products released by different companys (nokia & Sony Erricson), or The Big MS, that'll buy everything, and already kicked both there butts in the PDA market?
mlk
Considering Symbian has the support of Nokia, Siemens, Motorola and Sony-Ericson; while Microsoft and Palm have the support of either PDA makers (e.g. Compaq, Handspring)or new comers, the winner is mighty clear right now: Symbian. No use denying is :-)
I can't say much about PDAs or 3g cell phones or their OSs, can't see myself ever using one.
But most of the worlds cellphones & quite a few PDAs (Palm is a switching) are Arm based, & not so long ago, ARM licensed Java so that some newer Arms include low level JVM support in the Arms extended instruction set. This would tend to make the JVM much faster, lower the battery drain & make it more prevalent. Also Intel is pushing very hard to be big in this market on the silicon side of things, they are also a big Arm license with StrongArm for the more compute intensive devices and XScale for the networking HW. Ofcourse Motorola is now an Arm license as well.
I just don't see MS winning this one, they have tried many ventures over time outside Windows & sometimes lose big. That would change completely if they bought one of the competitors.
IIRC isn't Nokia (or Erickson) the biggest company in Europe period?, that would make them no easy pushover.
sony has been producing the clie palm-based series for a year now - 320x320 in hi-color is pretty standard for those. and sony's latest NR series is 320x480. i use my clie (and my nokia as a NIC) to read forums on a daily basis.
"Symbian [...] doesn't need multithreading [...]"
I thought Symbian was a direct derivated OS from Epoch32, which, if my memory is correct, was a very good multithread OS, (and stable, and fast, and reliable, etc).
Anyway... I put my bet on Symbian anytime. Psion have been kind of killed by Palm & Microsoft. Now it's payback time :-)
I agree that Symbian OS is the best bet in the long term.
> It appears to be a very powerful os that doesn't need
> multithreading(it sort of emulates it with clever
> callbacks i guess).
Symbian OS (or EPOC as it was called until recently) is indeed a fully multi-threaded OS, but threads are not used extensively (for resource-saving reasons I think) like BeOS for instance.
If you take the look at the most recent Sony Clie, it has a screen resolution of 320x480 and it's running PalmOS in a quasi clam-shell model. It's maybe too big for a phone, but it is getting there. You have a lot more space for the screen if you somehow put it in it's own area. The same applies for the Nokka 7650 which has a resolution of 176 x 208 Pixel on a 35 x 41 mm screen. And this is only the start.
If you really need a high screen resolution, wait for some eye implant 
Thanks for the correction Mario, and I agree I might have taken the best number for all of them to make the point. I could have said "Nokia is aiming at 40%" but I thought that was too much. Here are some stats.
Gartner Dataquest: Nokia 34.7%
Analytics: 35.4%
SoundView: 36.7%
Not 100% sure where they took them from and some might be for quarter while other's for the year, which is where the shares fluctuate a bit. Nice to see somebody at Nokia arguing for a lower marketshare
I agree with mario that that many of the main applications if not all of them will be developed specifically for the phone. I have not yet seen any stats on execution speed though but somebody can gladly mail me if they have more info on this.
I also don't know how much Java can use of the phones capabilities. Magpie sounds amazing for example, but will Java apps be able to interact with it? That might make some cool nice simple apps possible.
http://www.symbian.com/technology/magpie.html
The new SonyEricsson P800 smartphone will feature the symbian OS. Take a look at this whitepaper to see the excellent featues.
No other smartphone will come close to this for a looong time.
http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/
developerszonedown/downloads/docs/p800/P800_WP.pdf
-Knut
There it is.
http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/developerszonedown/downloads/...
-Knut
"So Java will be nice and fast."
Disclaimer: I do not work in Symbian development, so all my remarks are based on direct experience with the actual product.
Said that, your remark sounds as if you never actually tried Java on Symbian. Well, I have, and my post, to which you replied and which I will not repeat, was based on my actual user experience with a phone with Symbian and Java applets. I don't say they were not useful, but it was clear they were not performing any computation-intensive work. I'd still put down Java under "nice to have". There is a lot of Java applets like this, there will be even more, and they will be easily protable across handhelds (Symbian and non). So, there is a business case for it.
And just one last note: customers don't buy mobile phones because they use Symbian. They buy a mobile phone that has a certain set of features. Whether the OS behind them is Symbian or not, nobody cares. Symbian will have to stand on it's own merits, no corporate clout or buzzword-compliance will save it. But the fact that so many great companies are developing for Symbian (companies that KNOW how to develop for this kind of devices!!!) give good chances to this OS. Symbian will win (IMHO) simply because there will be way too many good reasons in it's favor.
And just one very last comment, after which I won't post anymore in this thread: I still like my Palm Pilot ;o)
(and loathe the Agenda)
Symbian is interesting but i think there is a problem there. The manipulation and jury rigging of the market by Nokia ericsson adn the rest of the GSM crowd is not working. The market will decide not a few phone vendors.
3G (W-CDMA) is a flop and there are still precious few symbian devices on the market. The turn around for handhelds and smart phones is probably going to take a lot longer than everyone thinks.
Palm won't just disappear and neither will MS, particularly when both those vendors are sending their pitch to the wireless carriers. The carriers decide all. Nokia, ericsson, motorola just think they decide all. You also have the Japanese vendors and carriers, most of whom are not rolling out symbian devices. The market will be fragmented and you will probably see linux, MS, symbian, Palm, and a few proprietary OS's. Don't' listen to the symbian/GSM crowd. The pipe they have been smoking is about to run dry; sobriety will hurt.
http://www.savaje.com
They have a Java based OS for ARM devices. They are selling Java 2 SE v 1.3.x for Compaq iPAQs today. Not J2ME, not personal java, but J2SE. They've announced support for next generation smartphones.
Nokia is a giant for a reason: they make good small cell phones. A large "Communicator" that doesn't fit in a pants pocket let alone a shirt pocket isn't going to make Nokia the giant of the smartphone world. Furthermore there are many people who don't want a phone combined with a PDA. They may want it with integrated wireless internet but they don't want it to be designed for phone use (smaller screen, battery drain, POTS keypad, etc). While Sony Ericsson does a good job with their symbian phone, it still has the limitations of a phone. PalmOS can be found in full screen PDAs such as Sony Clie along with Palmphones such as Kyocera and Samsung.
the Sony Ericsson P800 has many cool features but the new Kyocera 7135 has many other interesting features such as 16 bit color display (~65 thousand colors), SD expansion slot, built in GPS locator, mp3 player, movies, theoretical download speed of up to 153 Kbps and compatibility with thousands of PalmOS apps
Your right, I've not used one, as AFAIK none are out in the wild yet (EPOC supports it, but I'm cheep and went with a Revo, not a Revo Plus, even then it's not a good example, these devices (and I guess some of the phones) do not use the Java-enable proccessor).
Do you mind if I ask which, and what was it like?
>Nokia is a giant for a reason: they make good small
>cell phones. A large "Communicator" that doesn't fit
>in a pants pocket let alone a shirt pocket isn't going
>to make Nokia the giant of the smartphone world.
But it already has, if you count the Nokia Communicator in with PDAs it's the biggest seller in Europe by far.
>While Sony Ericsson does a good job with their symbian
>phone, it still has the limitations of a phone. PalmOS
>can be found in full screen PDAs such as Sony Clie
>along with Palmphones such as Kyocera and Samsung.
I can imagine there will always be some form of PDA-phones but the Phone-PDAs will outnumber them by vast quantities. How many PDAs were sold last year? Maybe 20 million worldwide, I would guess a lot less.
Nokia alone sell 6 times that and Nokia are committed to putting Symbian onto something like 40% of their phones. Within a couple of years it looks like Nokia alone could be shipping more Symbian devices than Palm and PocketPC combined, and thats not counting SonyEricsson, Siemens Motorola etc..