The Symbian OS was a team effort between Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens. Reports said, that in the eve of the 10th year anniversary from the creation of Symbian, Nokia has bought the 8.4% Siemens stake for 70 million Euros ($108.6 million) and will now have over 56% of controlling interest in the group, but the press release says that Nokia takes it all. This could have created quite some uneasiness to the other players, but Nokia will play nice.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-09-06
So far, Nokia has been playing nice with a lot of people. There actions have demonstraited this even when there news releases may not. I've actually been becoming quite a fan as I learn more about what they are doing currently. They are a huge silent FOSS contributor where other companies would use that for marketing spin. They manage to open as much of the Maemo source as they can though I hope they find ways too open it further without loosing the FOSS/Business balance they have. The work to bridge GTK and QT is a big step in the right direction (My KeepassX will be able to properly talk too the GTK Window Manager and browser under Maemo finally.) Nokia's phone product lines "just work" with Linux based OS and the BSD's thanks to there support on the Gnokii project. I'm not seeing that from other companies nearly as much; just try getting a Motorola working with your nonWindows/nonOSX system. They are currently hiring out of the Maemo FOSS community for management and development of the platform so I can't see them closing the source suddenly on that device at least.
As for Palm:
- Left PalmOS to stagnate in it's own swill for years on end
- Baught BeOS then did nothing with it
- Split the OS development into a second company
- Eventually sold PalmOS and BeOS too Access splitting it away entirely
- WinCE on Treo (what more is there to say there .. marketing again beats out over the better technology)
- Scrapped the Foleo instead of being the company to start a new line of devices like they did with the original Palm.
I used to be such a fan of there products but I wouldn't use Palm as an example for comparison against Nokia. They've chewed the pooch too many times too count. They had a wonderful device at one time long ago; the N800 was the first device I could honestly consider an upgrade from the T5 though I held out as long as I could hoping Palm would update it.
(LiveDrive is a nice device but a slower cpu and platter based storage is no upgrade too faster cpu and solid state storage in the T5. The TX was an even bigger step down from the T5; trade a wifi radio for all the really beneficial functions in the T5 - no thanks.)
Still, Nokia is a business bound by corporate law so the first thing to do is disregard the marketing spin for the shareholders beyond it's superficial anouncement and watch the actions of the company. If there actions continue as they have been recently.
Edited 2008-06-24 13:14 UTC
Member since:
2006-01-23
Nokia will play nice? One can hope, but they are still a business, are they not?
Besides, we watched Palm try new things, buy BeOS, sell BeOS, buy...oh wait...what happened next? Symbian + Qt + Nokia = ?
I hope it all works out or there could be some extremely exciting changes.