Nick Jones over on Gartner late last week weighed in with some thoughts on Symbian. Our thanks to Nick for bringing this up
I’ve just completed three Gartner symposium conferences and so have spent a lot of time talking to clients in Europe, APAC and the USA about mobile platforms. And one thing I noticed was how seldom people talked about Symbian. Remember Symbian? It’s the dominant smartphone platform by far, well over 40% of smartphones shipped in Q3 used Symbian.
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Nick’s point was:
I’ve had more questions about the potential of Android as a corporate smartphone platform than Symbian even though the latter is far more consistent, secure and mature.
He also points out that Android basks in Google glory while Apple gets a ton of marketing $$ spent on maintaining the hype around iPhone. Those are strong words in favour of Symbian.
Jones points out though that no-one is evangelising Symbian.
The follow up debate in the comments is also very interesting, Paul B weighing in with a view that Symbian needs a great handset launch to help the brand.
Of course resources are an issue for the Symbian brand and Paul is right that new product launches based on a future platform will help.
I still feel we are making very little of two aspects of change that are important to every business and hence to every enterprise platform purchaser.
The first is that all businesses are now concerned with open management – open innovation for starters and then more open, transparent business practices.
The second is that Symbian as a brand is not just open as in”going open source” but is also working with more open and transparent management processes.
Business is changing in fundamental ways – in many fundamental ways – and Symbian as an organisation is well aligned with those changes and in some sense pioneers change. We can make more of a virtue of the platform being aligned with those changes too.
> Jones points out though that no-one is evangelizing Symbian.
Having just returned from the US I can comment that on TV almost 1 in 5 adverts are for a mobile phone. Approximately 20% for misc non-Symbian devices, 30% for Apple and 50% for one or other Android version.
> The follow up debate in the comments is also very interesting, Paul
> B weighing in with a view that Symbian needs a great handset
> launch to help the brand.
“Launching” a 10 year old brand is a bit of a sad statement on where we are to date.
Is there any agreement from Nokia or any other handset company to put “Symbian inside” or equivalent on any of their advertising or packaging?
Without even that level of commitment it’s going to be a massive uphill struggle.
Welcome back to the blog David. Missed your comments
Going to be a massive uphill struggle – I think that misjudges the nature of the web – it could be done if we get a good “popularity” strategy in place.
Honestly, I think most people are waiting around to see whether the next iteration of Symbian’s UI can compete with the iPhone, Maemo, and Android. To my knowledge, we have only seen conceptual videos that have not shown much. Until Symbian demonstrates a substantive future UI that people can honestly be excited about, there will be little buzz surrounding the platform.
I believe that the main issue why people think Symbian is dead is exactly whats being told in this blog post. Its all marketing really.
I also think that the second reason why Symbian is not doing too hot is because they have two flagship devices with flawed launches (SE Satio and Nokia N97 Classic) and the Omnia HD was did not grab the press the way it should.
Another reason would be the current dev tools in production for Symbian is not as easy to get into as Android or .NET Mobile. QT looks promising and I am looking forward to getting my feet wet with the full version
Just my humble opinion.
@Matt – the UI issue is fair comment but y recollection of the early days with my iPhone are – what a lousy product, lousy service too. It didn’t work and let me down badly when i was roaming. Look too at iPhone in China – not such a good performance since launch. We can fall into the trap of believing all we hear about competitors – so I think Nick has some valid points about getting better messages out there and living our values more publicly.
Hi Benjamin – very useful points and thanks for the contribution – my sense is the Symbian family has not had to try hard in a competitive context for some years because of market dominance. We need to re-learn some marketing values and techniques (for the WEB!)
I’m sure most people using e.g. Nokias don’t know they’re on Symbian. Unless they have read the numerous articles stating what a burden Symbian is for Nokia (which btw. is not my opinion
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Samsung now has a large ad campaign for touch phones here in Finland. On those ads they had a Symbian logo (or at least the name) next to Omnia HD’s picture (of course, they had a significantly larger amount of WM devices and one Android in the campaign too). That was the first place where I remember it being promoted with a bit more style.
Jarijohan – very interesting. You don’t happen to have an image of that ad by any chance?
I think Samsung’s ridicolous unstable decisions about the OS they use has hurt Symbian platform more than anything.
Same goes for Sony. These companies say “OK we will use Symbian”, Symbian blogs and execs party about it and the result? One of the buggiest phones ever (Satio) and Samsung saying “We go with our own OS” (good luck with that!).
I think Symbian should choose their partners well and also support little (compared to others) companies like Opera ASA who does release one of the best ever mobile browsers for free. A clever Symbian dealer could install Opera 10 beta right now and show it to whoever technical can’t decide between iPhone/Symbian and say “Here, this thing (Opera) can’t be released on iPhone because it duplicates (read: it is better) built in Apple functionality”.
Opera has no obligation to support Symbian, especially the abandoned UIQ3 but they did their job, they released full desktop browsers on S60 and UIQ3 which in UIQ3 case, is a miracle which I can’t still believe.
Companies like Nimbuzz, Fring(land), Google (maps etc) should be put to spotlight too. What about Spotify? Why didn’t we hear a word about it from Symbian foundation? That other twitter client is said to be the best on industry too.
Fring recently enabled video chat in Skype which (amazingly) couldn’t be done by Skype _themselves_. It seems like they have chosen Symbian platform because of some unique features and ease of release (try it on app store). For an ARM device, it is an amazing breakthrough and yet all we hear is how Skype never released their S60 client.
There is a communication problem, it is not about Apple fans or Nokia “enemies”, people simply doesn’t know/see what is possible with Symbian. It includes developers too. Only way out is concentrating on multi platform friendly, “plugging in” (to xcode, ms vs and even kdevelop) releases for Qt. Something that will produce “.sis” file all automatically when developer clicks “Go”. If you rely on Eclipse… You have no clue about its image.
Haydn – Sorry, don’t have it anymore. I’ll snap a picture and post it if I come by it.