Today Symbian announced that Nokia have become the majority owner and has given away the worlds most popular smartphone platform to the Symbian Foundation. In the same announcement Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT Docomo who are joint owners of UIQ and MOAPS have announced that they will contribute their platform to form a new open platform for manufacturers.
In all Symbian, S60, UIQ, MOAPS and all the little variants in between will now become one totally unified platform for mobile devices.
Nokia’s announcement alone is a huge move, not only have they contributed the most successful smartphone platform but cemented their commitment to open platforms. They already have their fully open Maemo linux platform and recently acquired Trolltech’s QT.
So what does this mean for developers?
Firstly its not going to happen tomorrow, at the very earliest this will take until 2009 to really start. The Symbian Foundation will likely begin to integrate the various platforms together into a unified view, so I’m guessing we’ll not see this on devices for at least two years. Importantly however a Flash porting layers in the platform will be delivered to Foundation partners.
Building applications for this new platform will undoubtedly be much simpler, you can fully expect to develop a single code base and have that run on handsets globally from at least four manufacturers. SDK, documentation, sample code, forums and tech support will be free.
It looks like the new platform will be based off S60 3rd Edition (think N95) but will have UIQ touch features and MOAPs service features integrated. Backwards compatibility is a big problem and I’m glad to hear that they are committed to maintaining this to ensure investment is still high.
The timeline states that the platform will ship in the second half of 2009 to OEMs. Devices will be certified compatible with the platform to ensure that developers are catered for.
I’m quite sure that Adobe will become a member very soon!
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