What Symbian has become
I talked with several people at the Symbian Smartphone show about Motorola’s new share in UIQ. There’s an insightful analysis at Vision Mobile that reveals as much about Motorola’s use of Mobile Linux as it does about UIQ.
Another topic that came up when I spoke to people at the show was the balance of code that makes up a Nokia device. Andreas Constantinou at Vision Mobile says..
"Longer term, the OS game for UIQ stakeholders becomes quite interesting. The Symbian stack provides little value above the kernel and drivers (Symbian has essential become akin to a board support package) - read the latest specs of S60 (here) to see that not only the application suites and UI frameworks, but also the vast majority of middleware have been drawn out of Symbian OS. In other words, the value of the Symbian OS software stack is similar to that of a zero-royalty Linux-based stack from the likes of MontaVista and WindRiver."
I agree that far too much code is now in S60 as opposed to the base Symbian OS. Originally, it was intended that licensees such as Nokia pass back generic libraries to Symbian for assimilation into the Symbian OS. This hasn’t happened. This certainly lowers the value of the Symbian OS… but I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s similar to that of a "zero-royalty Linux-based stack". Symbian OS provides many facilities and more importantly an ecosystem and tools that Mobile Linux hasn’t even started to tackle. However, in terms of UIQ it means that many of the S60 libraries have to be re-written by UIQ or UIQ licensees in order to keep up with Nokia.
Andreas goes on to say…
"However, while academically it’s possible to replace Symbian with a Linux support package (kernel, hardware drivers and base OS functions), it is an expensive undertaking, of the order of $50 million"
I don’t believe these ideas about replacing Symbian under UIQ (or S60 for that matter) are that realistic. Yes, it would be possible at a cost (is $50 million high anyway compared to say Nokia’s profits?). However, as I have said before, the Symbian idioms and mechanisms really wouldn’t tie in well into Mobile Linux and you would end up with a Frankenstein OS that would be (even more) difficult to understand and maintain.
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