Is it too late to save Symbian?

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Is Nokia doomed?

Milansei believes that Nokia will catch up though.

“Nokia will continue to work on Symbian and improve S60. No developer can ignore a platform that is backed by the leading phone manufacturer," she said. "Its dominance however will decrease and market share will be more levelled.”

But Bamforth believes this a whole new start to how the smartphone market will be aligned in future.

We’ve already seen the demise of Symbian from certain manufacturers – only Sony Ericsson and Nokia are still using the platform.

Sony Ericsson uses the platform in its high-end consumer mobiles, packing them with multimedia, rather than business features.

Just business?

Nokia is much more likely to continue using the platform as a business OS, although it seems Maemo could pose a threat for the highest-end devices.

“As we watch other platforms blossom, and manufacturers adopt them more widely, Symbian’s drop off in licensee adoption is a challenge," said Bamforth.

“Manufacturers need an OS that will not only make it easier for them to build devices, but for those who deploy to make the device work in a network environment. When it was mainly about telephony, this was operator appeal, but not it is about more applications so must appeal to a wider eco-system of developers and integrators etc."

Applications - and how successful they are - mean a lot to the success of an operating system. Every smartphone manufacturer has an App Store – even if none of them has caught up with Apple yet.

As applications are such a strong trend at the moment, it’s surprising to see that Symbian’s app presence is missing a centralised store. Sure, Nokia’s Ovi goes someway to rectify the imbalance, but hundreds of available applications can hardly compete with hundred of thousands.

One platform ruling them all?

However, this doesn’t mean only one platform will conquer all, or even that the main smartphone operating systems will face a serious cut throat future. A number of platforms will co-exist, even if one or two platforms fail.

“I think it’s unlikely that mobile devices will collapse down to only one or two dominant platforms in the same way the desktop became Windows with a bit of Mac, but there may only be room for fewer participants in the mobile platform space,” said Bamforth.

He added: “Out of Android, Apple, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian there will have to be either closer alignment or reduction in options, as developers will not be able to target them all.”

Until Symbian makes the necessary changes to compete with newer user interfaces and platforms such as Windows Mobile (with a customised interface), Android or Mac OS X, there’s little hope for the waning OS.

It’s only a matter of time until we’ll see whether the Symbian 4 UI is strong enough to battle against the competitors. That said, the real results won’t be seen until well into 2011, after versions 2 and 3 are introduced this year.

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