There is no doubt that personal computing is experiencing a tremendous transformation. In today's context, where mobile devices oversell PCs by a factor of 5, manufactures and software developers evolve quickly and compete fiercely for a place in our pockets.
A few months ago, Google announced its yet-to-be-deployed Android platform, an open-source operating system (OS) for mobile devices that threatened to challenge a market dominated primarily by proprietary code. The hype around the announcement has been since dismissed by companies like Microsoft and Apple who monitor the initiative with little more than cautious skepticism, specially since Android is not yet available commercially.
This context, however, has just been turned completely on its head, following the announcement that Symbian, the OS running on 60% of the smart phones available today, is about to go open source. This is part of an aggressive strategy by Nokia, which invested $410 million in the acquisition of all remaining shares of Symbian, to maintain its leadership in the mobile devices market through an open source development model.
Unlike Google Android, Nokia's Symbian has already millions of users around the world, and, best of all, it has a long history of support for 3rd-party applications, custom development and inclusive technologies. Thus, with this new open source approach, the Symbian platform is about to become a lot more attractive to custom application developers, specially the SCYP team, since there is no doubt that open source software development models effectively accelerate the research, development and deployment of inclusive technologies.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment