Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is trying. Hard. After a slight delay, the Finnish company that was once that most valuable and powerful mobile phone manufacturer on the planet has started shipping its N8 smartphone. The N8 is positioned as a competitor to Apple Inc.‘s (NASDAQ: APPL) iPhone 4, Motorola‘s (NYSE: MOT) Droid X, and Research in Motion‘s (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry phones.
More than Nokia’s position in the smartphone market is at stake with the N8’s release though. The new phone also represents Nokia’s last ditch effort to keep the Symbian^3 operating system a relevant and viable alternative to Google Inc.‘s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android mobile operating system and Microsoft’s impending Windows Phone 7 platform. With more and more of Symbian’s remaining supporters dropping the platform every day, it’s impossible not to wonder if the N8 will be Nokia’s last major product to use the operating system.
After using Symbian^1 and ^2 in their cellular phones for years, Nokia purchased Symbian in 2008. Rather than turn the platform into its own proprietary mule, Nokia gave all Symbian intellectual property to the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit founded to further develop the operating system. The foundation’s members included numerous mobile phone manufacturers in addition to Nokia. Motorola, NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM), LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson all threw their weight behind Symbian following Nokia’s acquisition. The move was an attempt to cement Symbian’s place as the world’s leading standardized smartphone operating system before Google’s rollout of Android later that year.
It didn’t work. Symbian support has been flagging over the past twenty-four months. At the beginning of September, only four mobile phone makers other than Nokia still supported the platform. Yesterday, Sony Ericsson announced that they had no plans to include Symbian as the OS in any future devices. Hours later, an email was sent to registered Symbian developers that Samsung would be dropping support of the platform as well. (Samsung vice president Don Joo Lee said in early 2009 that his company would be dropping Symbian in favor of developing its own mobile OS called Bada. Bada debuted this past August on the Samsung Wave S8500 and sold 1 million units in its first month. Not terrible, but not exactly a challenge to Google and Apple.) With Samsung and Sony Ericsson turning to Android and Windows Phone 7, Symbian’s only remaining supporters are NTTDoCoMo and Sharp in Japan.
Research firm Gartner (NYSE: IT) published a report in September that claimed Symbian would be the dominant mobile operating system by 2014, controlling 30.2% of the market, followed by Google’s Android, then Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS, and Apple’s iOS in fourth place. With BlackBerry 6’s future in doubt after the debut of RIM’s BlackBerry Tablet OS and the migration of its final supporters away from Symbian to Google’s platform, it’s questionable whether or not Symbian will even be a factor in the smartphone market. Unless Nokia’s N8 somehow captures the North American and European markets, and Nokia is able to maintain their dominance in China, Symbian^4 may be the last version of the operating system to hit retail in a smartphone.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
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