The military sounds of the Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, could have accompanied the Nokia deal to buy out its Symbian partners and release the whole kit and caboodle to an open source process.
The announcement, accompanied only by the payment of a mere $410 million this week, massively strengthened the traditional handset vendors and cellular operators, and in one stroke effectively killed off both Linux on the handset, and any chance that Googles Android had of taking the cellphone by storm.
The Linux of the handset is now definitively Symbian, and just to prove it everybody joined in including all the other major handset vendors, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and LG, some of the worlds top operators in NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone and AT&T and two of Nokia’s favorite chip partners, Texas Instruments and STMicro.
The industry has spent the past four or five years flirting with Linux, just because it was both free and not dominated by a single vendor, but in the process virtually had to re-write it. Now, by borrowing a leaf from the Sun book, Nokia has made Symbian as open as Linux or Sun’s Java language, everyone can see the code, everyone can work their own magic on top of the code and no-one has to pay anyone anything for the pleasure.
Oh, almost certainly minor details of which features are in Symbian and which are not in, will be controlled in the future by Nokia, in the same way that Sun used this fraction of control to stop Microsoft hijacking Java, but the move is enough to ease the disquiet over the operating system and bring most of the world’s established cellular forces behind a single approach.
And this is not just Symbian. This is about all the tools that have been built on Symbian by all of its previous adherents, including Nokias Series 60 and 40, the core development tools for all its phones, which will also go into the new open source foundation, and Motorola and Sony Ericsson will donate their jointly owned UIQ platform, and DoCoMo will donate MOAP. This is a big chunk of proven, industrial strength software. Motorola had previously fallen out with the Symbian camp, but today it has turned itself entirely around on this decision to be totally pro-Symbian, and talks about it as if it was the company’s salvation, which it may have to be given the parlous state of its finances.
This is a gathering of everyone who felt threatened by Google’s coming Android and by the Apple iPhone and in a single step it will shift a huge developer base away from Android and it will enable all of Apples rivals to more easily follow the design innovation of the iPhone.
This is the Windows event for the handset, when the world stopped arguing and agreed that all handsets should have a single graphical user interface tool, not that they should look the same, but the tool that designs future interfaces, works the same.
To the average man on the street, free Symbian means all those smart functions on expensive phones come down to cheaper phones that much more rapidly. Phones that offer clever graphical interfaces like the iPhone, which cope with email, video and web browsing, will, because of this announcement, happen sooner on cheaper devices.