Quick, name the most popular smartphone operating system in the world: It isn’t Android, iPhone or the BlackBerry OS. Say hello to Symbian, an open source mobile OS that’s nearly a decade old. More than 300 million devices worldwide run Symbian. Some 41 percent of smartphones have Symbian on them.
Despite its popularity, Symbian is broken. The operating system’s user interface lacks the snazziness of its rivals, its touchscreen capabilities feel grafted on. It is slow, and developing apps for Symbian is hard.
With younger, prettier competitors in the market, Symbian seems like an aging actress that should have already stepped out of the spotlight.
Symbian also seems to be losing corporate support. Earlier this week, Lee Williams, CEO of the Symbian Foundation resigned for “personal reasons.” Williams, an enthusiastic champion of Symbian and a vocal critic of Google’s Android OS, often did media rounds touting Symbian.
Williams’ exit came on the heels of handset makers Sony Ericsson and Samsung declaring they will no longer manufacture devices running the operating system. With their departures, the only companies left on board with Symbian are Sharp and ZTE (not exactly handset trendsetters), plus Nokia, the one company that truly relies on the OS and with which its fortunes are intricately connected.
Sure, it’s the dominant OS worldwide, but with the rise of smartphones, Symbian hardly seems positioned for the future.
So can Symbian be fixed? Yes, say developers and analysts.
“It’s too early to abandon Symbian,” Nick Jones, an analyst with Gartner Research wrote on his blog last month. “It’s sick, but it’s far from dead; it’s still out-shipping other mobile OSes by a huge margin.”
Freddie Gjertsen, head of product development for Touchnote, an app that is available across Android, iPhone and Symbian, agrees.
“It’s an OS that has had 12 years of continuous development, many thousand of hours of bug testing and fixing. There’s a stability and robustness there that should count for something,” he says. “If Nokia focuses on it, I don’t see why Symbian can’t be fixed.”
Nokia executives says despite the discontent around Symbian, they aren’t willing to give up on the OS. Symbian could put smartphones within the reach of millions of users who can’t pay more than $100 for an unsubsidized device, they say.
To get there, though, Nokia will have to fix four major things: Symbian’s user interface, developer support, app-development environment and the leadership vacuum for the platform.
“How difficult is to fix Symbian? Not so much,” says Rich Green, CTO of Nokia. “You will see some major changes in the forthcoming release of Symbian.”
One of those changes will be to release a version of the OS more often than Symbian’s current schedule of about every 18 months. “That will improve the usability of the OS and keep up with the trend,” says Green.
As for developers, they have the siren call of a global market that can be difficult to resist.
“We can give developers the whole world,” he says. “When you think about the reach Nokia has with Symbian, that is untouched by any other vendor.”
Getting a better UI
Remember older smartphones such as HTC’s Sidekick? They had resistive touchscreens and confusing menus that were difficult to use. The iPhone raised the bar for both hardware and user experience. It ushered in an interface that was clean, driven by icons rather than text-based menus and easy to navigate.
In 2008, when Google launched Android on the HTC G1, it offered a similar experience. Since then, even Microsoft has reinvented its mobile OS to have a UI with some pizzazz.
Not so with Symbian.
“There’s only one problem with Symbian and that is the user interface,” says Jan Ole Suhr, a Berlin, Germany, app developer who has worked on the Symbian platform since 2003.
“From a technical point of view, it is still the best OS: It consumes very little power, is robust and has been there since 2002 running on millions of phones,” he says. But, yes, the UI is really lacking.”
Suhr says it won’t take much to fix the UI but is puzzled that Nokia hasn’t done it so far.
“A change to the UI is not so hard,” he says. “The UI is just the presentation layer of the OS. An OS is far more complex. With a little effort, they can turn around the Symbian ship in no time.”
Nokia executives defend the company’s efforts. Symbian^3 tries to bring a fresh look to the mobile phone UI and future versions of the UI will be better, says Kai Öistämö.
“Android and iOS could start from a blank sheet of paper,” says Öistämö. “But Symbian has to carry the past so it has unfortunately created a bit of slowness in the UI experience.”
Another way to to help developers create better looking apps for the OS is to adopt Qt, an app and UI framework that can work across platforms, says Nokia. Nokia announced Thursday that it’s putting its energies into Qt as the sole app-development platform.
