1. Symbian is recently attacked from all fronts. From top, behind, front, under, inside, outside… everybody is saying Nokia will abandon Symbian, or Symbian will die, or Maemo will replace Symbian or Symbian UI is clunky and outdated and many more. Why?
2. But how true, this assumptions are? What do they base their observations from? Does an outdated UI qualify to be a dinosaur? Or, If it’s not made by Americans it’ll be doomed? Or if it doesnt become American media-darling, it will fail? Why choosey?
3. To be honest, I am a little bit disappointed by the way media portrayed Symbian. I mean, lets look at Windows Mobile for example, it’s market share is going south, the UI is still ugly and stupid, but nobody makes noise about it like they did with Symbian. Why the silence?
4. The old Symbian (under Symbian Limited) is dead. That might be true (depends on how you look at it), and the new Symbian (under Symbian Foundation) hasn’t shown it’s strength yet. Why kill it?
5. The new Symbian OS & UI (under the name Symbian ^4) will be made available in the market somewhere in the end of 2010 (if everything goes as planned). Nothing is concrete about the new UI untill a real device is released. Why make noise?
6. There are millions of legacy Symbian smartphones in the world at the moment. Ranging from S60, S60 3rd-Edition, S60 5th-Edition, MOAPs, UIQ, UIQ3. These are still used by millions of people (regular people, not geeks), in their daily lives. Why they still use Symbian?
7. In many parts of the world that is not Geekland, people took years to change their phones for many reasons, price and technology are among them. These people will only change phones when they lost the old one or it is hit by a truck! Why so strange?
8. Symbian Foundation is working very hard to continue Symbian’s proven legacy and to break new grounds with new technologies. For example, EKA2 is one of the best kept secret by phone manufacturers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson but it is now opened, fully opened and accessible for others to take a peek into it and see why Symbian is more advanced and more efficient than any other mobile OS in existence. Others can learn a lot. Why nobody make noise about it?
9. iPhone and Android, said to be the new mobile OS that will bury Symbian to the ground, has not yet reached the said momentum. I cant see any Android powered device sold openly in my place. What?
10. If something is not born yet? How can you kill it? The new Symbian is NOT yet available in the market and people are already saying it’s dead, it’s dying, it wont survive, yada yada yada… Come on people, back to reality please….
- Asri al-Baker