Yesterday, analyst firm J. Gold Associates stated that they expect the Google Android and Nokia Symbian operating systems to merge into a single platform.
“We expect that within the next three-six months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single open source OS,” stated the firm. “Many of the same sponsors are involved in both initiatives.”
Not so, says Nokia. During the Mobile Web Wars roundtable today, an audience member asked for opinions on the merger rumor. David Rivas, VP of Technology Management for S60 Software at Nokia, just so happened to be on the panel, and he stated (twice) that there were no plans to merge the two platforms.
We’ll update with a clip (or at least a direct quote) after the round table is over.
Symbian is archaic. Try sharing source code between a Symbian project and some other mobile platform. The Open C initiative is a step in the right direction, but in my opinion, Nokia should bite the bullet and adopt Android. They even achieve a certain degree of backwards compatibility by implementing some Symbian API’s on top of Android, creating a “Symbian” layer that co-exists with Android’s Java UI layer.
Apple did just this with the Mac OS 9 API’s when they moved to OS X.
But of course Nokia won’t.
Comment by Mr. PoopyPants — July 28, 2008 @ 9:06 am