John Forsyth on staying top dog against increasing competition.
What now for Symbian? It’s still the largest smartphone operating system by a hefty margin, but its market share is slipping.
Earlier this week, Gartner claimed that its market share fell from 52.4% in 2008 to 46.9% last year in the face of competition from BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.
Even so, Symbian isn’t lying down just yet. Last week at Mobile World Congress, it unveiled Symbian S^3 – the first purely open-source version of the OS – while talking about its plans for S^4 later this year.
ME sat down with John Forsyth from Symbian’s leadership team last week, to talk about the new OS and his views on the smartphone market. He described S^3 as providing “important building blocks for device manufacturers and application developers”, from enhanced multimedia support through to a slick new user interface.
However, we quickly moved onto the latter, and the way user experience was the focus for many of the new handsets launched at Mobile World Congress. “It’s a positive thing, but there’s also a slight trend towards people talking about 1GHz CPUs,” says Forsyth.
“Yet in the mobile space, as long as you’re running on one CPU core, the lower the clock-speed, the less power you’re going to be consuming – and the more likely you are to get through the day. It’s the single biggest problem plaguing contemporary smartphones: people are launching products that you can’t use for a day without recharging.”
Forsyth claims this is what will make Symbian appealing to handset makers and consumers – “we are capable of running on smaller CPUs than competing platforms, and we have an architecture designed to minimise power use”.
However, he also points to the multimedia capabilities of the new breed of Symbian phones, which are capable of HD recording and playback, as well as multi-tasking with applications – a hot theme at MWC given the ongoing debate around iPhone’s inability to let anything other than Apple’s own apps multi-task.
Which brings us onto another big feature for Symbian going forward – letting apps dig deeper into the OS. “Everything being isolated in its own application is not particularly helpful,” he says. “The model of having discrete standalone applications probably has some kind of limit – by the time you’ve got 100 of these things, it takes time to navigate to them.”
For that reason, Forsyth says that helping apps to tie into the core OS is an important path for Symbian, with data from various services coming through fewer core apps on the device.
Symbian’s new Social Web API taps into that idea too, helping developers create Symbian apps that aggregate data and contacts from different social networks and services, while also plumbing them into Symbian itself. This even extends to synchronising Facebook contacts with your phonebook.
“It seems to be a big trend in application and service development, and it’s something Symbian S^3 has a lot of,” says Forsyth.
But looking to the bigger picture, how will Symbian compete with the likes of Android and Windows Phone 7 Series going forward, given that both Google and Microsoft are keen to sign up more handset makers to use their smartphone operating systems.
Android seems to have the momentum right now when it comes to handset customisation by OEMs, while Windows Phone got a big boost at MWC. Why will handset makers continue to choose Symbian instead?
“One of the reasons is that most of the platforms are controlled by someone with commercial interests which may at some point come into conflict with that device vendor,” says Forsyth, choosing his words carefully.
“It’s a big worry in the minds of these guys. We’re in a transition where suddenly, for some of them, they can see a scenario where three quarters of their business is based on smartphones. There’s no way you’re going to allow that much of your business to be dependent on somebody whose business interests are potentially in conflict with yours.”
He also talks about the “long memories” of device makers, who were unhappy with Microsoft’s business model for Windows Mobile when it first launched early last decade.
“Some people who were very successful with software in the PC market turned up at the beginning of this millennium licensing their platform with an approach and pricing model that absolutely staggered me the first time I heard it,” he continues.
“That’s still in the minds of senior executives: they can’t give anybody monopoly power. Also, they’re pragmatic. This is a period of transition, so they’re going to try a bunch of things and see what sticks.”
It will be interesting to see if Symbian’s independence turns out to be as strong a USP as Forsyth says, although he admits that it may become more evident in the longer term, rather than immediately.
“We have no other interests to pursue, no axe to grind, and no conflict with any of our members. We don’t exist to make a profit, but to steer a platform. We are measured by their profits, not by ours. That will make us a very important strategic option in the longer term, for the majority of people.”
Even so, Google is clearly picking up a lot of business from handset makers, even if it’s encountering some suspicion from operators – as seen in some of the angry questions lobbed at its CEO Eric Schmidt during his MWC keynote Q&A.
Forsyth has other issues with Android, claiming that it suffers from a lack of transparency about the future of the platform.
“They simply don’t have a roadmap, so people don’t know what’s coming, and there isn’t a way to contribute and participate in that,” he says. Google might argue in response that its handset partners are free to modify Android for their own uses, including layering their own UIs and services on top of it.
However, Forsyth also targets the issue of fragmentation on Android and other platforms, particularly in its effects for developers.
“Several ...
Advertisement
“But in the world that Google is trying to operate in, you have many devices on different versions of Android, and even different releases of those versions. They’ve even said that fragmentation isn’t a bad thing, but it’s worrying for app developers. That was what killed mobile Java. Fragmentation is evil – that’s a good attitude for any platform organisation to have.”
Will developers flock to Symbian (or flock back to it in the cases of the ones who’ve moved to iPhone in recent times) with the new versions, though? The OS still has the advantage of scale, although that’s likely appreciated more by developers in Europe.
Forsyth admits that Symbian’s presence in North America is limited, although he says it will improve as more handsets are released there from the likes of Sony Ericsson.
What about other kinds of devices, like tablets? “We see interest in taking Symbian into other categories from other people, but we haven’t focused a lot on it ourselves,” he says.
“The phone market is a billion devices a year, and you have the capability to reach more people with a great application or device. That said, Symbian is open-source, so people can do what they like with it.”
