Nokia Buys Symbian, Plans Open Source
Nokia has announced that it will buyout its partners in the Symbian venture and gradually turn it into an open source development platform for mobile devices over the next two years. Here’s a link to the official press release, and there are also a slew of articles about what this means for Symbian developers on www.allaboutsymbian.com and elsewhere on the Web.
For a clear write-up on what this likely means for N-Gage in the long run (since it’s not likely to have any effect in the short term), you could do no better than checking out Tzer2’s article about this over on All About N-Gage. Stuart Dredge on Pocket Gamer also has a take on the news, as does Ripten.com.
So what’s your take?
June 24th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Those are opinions from outsiders. How’s your opinion as Nokia insider?
June 24th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I hope this means that N-Gage will be released on non-Nokia phones.
But seeing how Nokia seem to have interest in making N-Gage exclusive to a select few models, it doesn’t seem likely to happen. For example, the new 6220 Classic is technically powerful to be a N-Gage compatible device, but it isn’t.
Overall, this is extremly good news, though. I’ve always been a bit annoyed of the different Symbian flavors, and it’s nice to see them all merge into one. There been some UIQ only software that catched my interest, and some S60 only software, but it was obviously impossible to run them all on one phone.
Another good thing I hope this bring, is support for the Ogg Vorbis format into the default music player. I can’t see any reason why it isn’t supported there, but since the system will be open, the likelyness that they will include support for other open free formats seems to be good.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
all good but how about improving the already shite battery life of nokias . Come on no point playin if you aint near a power point
June 25th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Being a supporter of open-source minded software, I think this is really good news. The downside is, that even IF it is open source, it doesn’t mean it’ll be free to distribute. And open source doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be different standards. And now that it has been bought by Nokia, I’m afraid the other companies will drop support. Open-source is good, Company owned open-source can have it’s major drawbacks if not properly managed and advertised
June 25th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Great! This bring us more hope about N-Gage’s future (as this is a long term strategy)
We also hope Nokia releases soon a new N-Gage version -release candidate level, current one still have some bugs as if it were a beta :(-
Of course I’d love using Ovi’s Sync soon too
I’m a hard Nokia enthusiast!
June 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Hi Antony, since my focus at Nokia is pretty much exclusively on where we are with N-Gage in the here and now, I don’t have any great insight into what this announcement means, even though it is significant.
But I think it shows Nokia’s dedication to growing software and services as a business, and N-Gage is definitely an integral part of that plan.