It seems like Samsung is getting ready to drop its support for Symbian, at least if we’re to believe a news story posted on Digitimes. With the announcement of its in-house bada OS, Samsung seems to want to cut down on the software platforms that it uses for smartphones, which could be a good move long term.
Symbian is still Nokia’s baby, no matter the Symbian foundation or not, despite some other big heavy hitters in the industry being board members. We don’t know if this means that Samsung will leave the Symbian foundation or not, but it doesn’t make much sense that they’ll remain as a board member if they don’t have any intention of using the platform for their handsets.
It wasn’t too long ago that Motorola pulled the plug on Symbian and with the slow development of the next generation platform from Symbian, we’re not amazed that some of the large players are pulling out. The only global handset makers left in the board if Samsung leaves will be Nokia an Sony Ericsson, which makes you wonder how much life there’s left in the Symbian foundation.
Samsung’s focus will instead be on Windows Mobile, Android and bada, of which the latter two are open platforms. It will be interesting to see if Samsung can convince other companies to join up to create devices running the bada OS, but we have a feeling that it could be tough, especially with so many other open platforms lacking much needed manufacturer support.
This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on and despite Samsung’s fairly decent in-house attempts at feature phone operating systems, we have a slightly harder time being convinced about yet another smartphone platform that is set to compete with some very well established phone operating systems.
