Following Open Sourcing, Symbian Talks Netbooks and Tablets

Posted 02/05/2010 at 1:58pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Symbian, which powers a decent number of the world’s smartphones, has made good on its promise to go open source. The code, as much as possible anyway, has been made public. Great news if you happen to be in the smartphone business. But what does it mean for the rest of us? It could mean a lot, if the goals of Lee Williams, chief executive of the Symbian Foundation, are realized.

Symbian, like any other OS, needs to evolve (especially when there’s an Android stalking you). That’s a tough thing if you’re proprietary. Very few companies have the savvy to keep proprietary products ‘fresh.’ Rather than buck the general trend, Symbian will tap into the creative resources of third-party developers, who will update and add functionality to the OS.

And not just with smartphones in mind. Williams is looking to tablet PCs and netbooks as a logical extension of the Symbian OS. Which means it has to be hardware independent. Williams says there is a “Wild Ducks” project that makes Symbian hardware independent on smartphone platforms, and a port of Symbian to Intel’s Atom processor already exists.

As for tablets and netbooks, Williams says: “It’s very likely that, in the next year or two, you would see such a product hit the marketplace. A lot of companies are experimenting with PDA-tablet-style form factors, also for stereo systems, and internet-connected devices running low power on primarily ARM architecture.”

What’s interesting in all this is direction of OS movement. While ‘bigger’ OSes are struggling to fit into the smaller hardware environments of the netbook, tablet PC, and smartphone worlds, the opposite seems less true. Smaller OSes, like Android, Symbian, or the iPhone, are scalable upward, making them credible challengers for this emerging marketplace.

Image Credit: The Symbian Foundation