racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

We guess almost all of the tech blogs got it wrong: Nokia’s Symbian is NOT opensource, but rather it’s “open for business”…

We reported a few days ago that Symbian is going opensource, but Nokia decided to correct everyone else who reported the same thing:

Through these pages we are releasing source code to these collaborators, but are not maintaining Symbian as an open source development project.

They’re saying that the source is only open to “Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators”. The question begs: Why post the news publicly, if the source is only open to a few “collaborators”?

[Article via: Nokia Blog | Image via: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)]

One of the issues that were circling the Nokia and Microsoft partnership was the future of Symbian.

Symbian was taken over by Nokia last 2008, hoping that it would be their weapon against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Unfortunately it never happened, and Nokia fell even further behind. Then came the partnership with Microsoft with their Windows 7 Mobile OS; this resulted in Symbian becoming an “unwanted child”. And now, they became (partly) open source.

This would have been good news for Third-party Symbian devs out there, but it’s not all open yet. According to Petra Söderling, head of open source at Nokia’s Symbian division:

“The commercial product which is sold to customers is not ‘fully open’ [...] due to various consumer protection legislation, warranty and security reasons.”

The question now is: Will new developers still come and use Symbian, knowing that it won’t work with Nokia phones in the future?

[Article via: Thinq | Image via: Clive Darr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

If you time traveled to 2015, what would the Smartphone market look like? Who would be on the Top 3? If we believe what the IDC reports, the one on second place would belong to the Windows Phone 7.

And where would the other current powerhouse Smartphone makers be? Android would be at the top with 45.4 percent, the iPhone at the third spot at 15.3 percent and the Blackberry would be hanging on at the fourth with 13.7 percent market share.

IDC’s reason for putting Windows Phone 7 near the top?

“Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing experiences,” added Llamas. “The new alliance brings together Nokia’s hardware capabilities and Windows Phone’s differentiated platform. We expect the first devices to launch in 2012. By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android.”

Are they right in predicting it will be good enough to beat the iPhone? We’ll see come next year.

[Article/Image via: IDC Press Release]

Google Android has now overtaken Nokia Symbian on the top spot among smartphone platforms beating Apple iPhone on its way up, according to a research company that showed the end of the 10-year reign of Nokia.

Research company Canalys unleashed Monday that the 32.9 million handsets with Google platform (Android, Tapas, and OMS) that were sold last quarter were sufficient to overtake Nokia Symbian with 31 million handsets sold, Reuters reported.

Despite the fact that Nokia still shows great lead as the world’s biggest handset maker, it has proven its weak spots in the realm of smartphone during the past few years.

[via Engadget]

Social networking website Facebook revealed Facebook for Feature Phones, a new mobile application that is specifically intended for lower-end cell phones.

It can be noted that features phones take the majority of mobile users. Because of this, the largest social networking site partnered with Snaptu to launch an app for feature phones tagged as Facebook for Feature Phones.

Even if the mobile app for Facebook is the most downloaded free application for smartphones such as the iPhone, the users it targets merely represent a small fraction of the overall mobile users in the world.

Facebook for Feature Phones will be available for download on thousands of devices from the leading manufacturers of the world including Nokia, LG, and Sony Ericsson among others.

There are also plans of making this new app available in many countries without the need for data fees.

[via The Atlantic]