14 DAY TRIAL // Currently, the smartphone operating system market is dominated by the Symbian platform, a name that stayed in the lead for quite some time now. Greatly helped by Nokia, as well as by other mobile phone vendors, and by the lack of a powerful competitor, the Symbian OS took the lead on the market, though it seems that it started to fall fast lately. Although it would remain a leader for the next few years, Symbian is expected to lose the crown to more appealing operating systems out there, except for the event that some major changes to bring it back to the game are performed.
According to a recent blog post from Nick Jones, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Symbian is losing market share faster than before. Although it would keep its crown a little longer, other mobile platforms are gaining speed, including Google's Android OS, which grew a lot during the past year and a half or so. According to him, the platform does not offer the appealing user experience that other OSes out there can offer, and the soon to come new flavor (Symbian^3) won't do that either.
“I just looked on the Foundation web site and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases. What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn’t matter. For example: Audio policy packages for Symbian, WIFi direct, support for an “open cloud manifesto”, an accredited Symbian developer program for China, better multitasking, multiple personalized home screens, HDMI connection to external TVs, better web runtime support, better internal architecture and so on,” Nick Jones states.
While the S^3 platform won't solve Symbian's problem, the S^4 user interface would have too. In Jones' vision, the operating system is doomed if the next major version of Symbian won't come to the market with the necessary UI changes. “The S4 UI is a 'bet the platform' project,” he states, adding that the Foundation is in a delicate situation at the moment, as the future of the OS depends on this release. The UI is where they should focus the most, as users are mainly attracted by this area. “I think the Symbian foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the Android iceberg ahead,” Gartner's analyst concluded.