The world’s best-selling mobile operating system will get a series of upgrades in the new year. On Tuesday, Nokia outlined as many as five upgrades to the Symbian OS over the next year to 15 months.
While Symbian is still the most widely used phone OS, its market share has been slipping and Nokia has been criticized for not revamping the OS at a time when Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and other platforms are capturing market share. According to Gartner, Symbian’s worldwide share of the growing smartphone market dropped to 36.6 percent over the last year from 44.6 percent, even though the number of devices sold actually rose by about nine million. The research firm expects Android to replace Symbian as the world’s top platform by 2014.
Symbian, MeeGo
Nokia presented its vision of changes to Symbian on Tuesday at the 2010 International Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. It plans incremental rather than wholesale changes.
The plan outlined by Nokia senior manager Gunther Kottzieper begins with a software upgrade in the first quarter that includes as many as four dozen enhancements. A new user interface, a HTML5-compatible browser that is separate from the OS, and a home screen with increased flexibility are on the drawing board for the second and third quarters.
There are also expectations that Nokia will accompany these upgrades with hardware improvements in future devices, including dual-core processors and real optical zoom.
Nokia’s plan for Symbian is not its only horse in the race. MeeGo, a new operating system now in development in collaboration with Intel, is expected to be released in late 2011, and there are indications that a completely different approach to the user interface will be offered.
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