Samsung responds to Symbian claims, says it's still supporting it
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 12th 2009 9:18PM
posted Nov 12th 2009 9:18PM
Contrary to popular belief (and reports from yesterday), it seems that Samsung actually isn't planning to ditch Symbian anytime soon -- or at least it's not prepared to tell the public. Shortly after announcing its own Bada OS, rumors began to fly that Symbian support would fade in the near future; according to a company representative speaking with Mobile Burn, however, that's simply not true. To quote:'Course, just because it's "continuing" to support Symbian doesn't mean that the hammer won't fall tomorrow, but at least for now it seems the Big S is safe from seeing one of its own jump ship. Phew."Samsung is an initial member of Symbian Foundation and continues to cooperate with Symbian Foundation. At the same time, Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile. To provide more choices to meet consumers' many different tastes and preferences, we will continue our 'multi-OS' strategy."
Something's gotta give. 5 OSes from one manufacturer is too many.
if they can handle it and still make a profit why limit yourself? this is a business trying to make money.
Symbian Home Premium, Symbian Business, Symbian Ultimate, Snow Symbian, Karmic Symbian...
I prefer Symbian 7, 64 bit edition.
Another phone OS is not needed!!! Overkill imo.
Engadget is giving popups? Wow, maybe I need to turn that adblock back on....
I really thought you were classier than that, engadget. Also, they should replace symbian with android, not bada os.
As I said, digitimes is unreliable source. Think how many times it has gotten wron apple tablet release, four times or more.
Samsung might phase out symbian in a few years, but no way are they dropping it now. There's so many people using and gotten used to it if they dropped it they would lose a lot of revenue.
And as symbian is going through a big rewrite in a year or 2 dropping it now would look even stupider.
Nokia's already working on Maemo - Symbian's starting to fade...
Yeah! Replace it with Maemo, not Bada
the current symbian(3?idk) is. hopefully the next one is better than maemo/android/all the others.
Do you really think Maemo is the ONLY OS Nokia will use in the future?
Seriously?
S60 is the OS version that is going to go bye bye. Symbian as an OS is going to be changing into something else.
Contrary to popular belief (and the wishful thinking of the engadget community), Symbian isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It holds the largest share and probably will continue doing so for years to come. Nokia has a lot of money put on this horse and to suddenly ditch years of R&D to jump on the maemo bandwagon would be financial suicide.
I thought this comment from John Gruber of Daring Fireball was prescient:
"But one thing is certain: Samsung isn’t comfortable putting their fate in Windows Mobile’s hands."
And I think he's right. I don't think Bada is about dropping Symbian (which isn't very popular in the US) but about having a viable replacement for the joke that is Windows Mobile.
5 OS IS too many. However, a multiple OS strategy is viable for this industry as it helps to target niche markets/segments a lot better and in a more nimble manner than trying to adapt a single OS to accomodate everyone.
But it does seem like people are jumping onto the "I create my own mobile OS". Why waste the time and money? Eventually it consolidates anyway for compatibility and interoperability. The OS that is going to win is the one that has the most money thrown into it and how many device manufacturers support it; not whether it's any good.
It's going to be a fight between Symbian and iPhone OS and to be frank, Symbian will still end up being the most used due to the closed system by which Apple operates. This fight is identical to Windows vs Mac OS war. And in both these cases, it is a matter of business strategy and not about the platform.
People have perpetually been writing off Symbian but it still remains undefeated. It has lost lustre but is still undefeated 3 years after fierce competition. 3 Years is a lifetime in the mobile world. Every other OS will continue to play minor roles no matter how much journalistic coverage they get. With the amount of CONSTANT positive press coverage iphone and Android get, you would think they would have overtaken Symbian in the market already. Why haven't they? Even combined they don't.
This fight is about the overall global business strategy and nothing else.
i think bada was intended just to make the phones cheaper thats all. licences from WiMo, symbian probably cost like $50-100 and bada is free !
Samsung: "We still support Symbian. Doesn't mean we're going to release any phones with it. Oh BTW, here's our new Android phone..."
Crowd: "oooh.... aaaahh...."
Symbian: "WTF?"
I don't know why Engadget uses this anti-Symbian rhetoric!
Because it sucks.
I would consider WinMo before ever looking into a Symbian phone.
@E30 Kid: Why does it suck?
"Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile"
what? windows mobile an open operating system ? LMFAO
They said 'Open' NOT 'Open Sourced'. There is a defference. Winmo as much as people hate it is very capable of doing all the modern things other os's do. But it suffers from the its from mycrosoft syndrome.
its more open than iPhone at least :)
To be honest in this day and age I'm surprised any manufacturer uses Symbian for new phones.
It's no longer 2005 guys, even if Symbian phones feel like they were all manufactured back then.
I agree! Technolgy should stay with where its from. Its obseleste now.
@Tres
This is why:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f4/Smartphone_2009.svg/450px-Smartphone_2009.svg.png
The Symbian-powered Samsung i8910 HD certainly doesn't feel like it was manufactured in 2005.
If you use Microsoft's search engine from this OS, would it be referred to as a Bada Bing? >bada bing!
I say drop freaking TouchWiz or whatever their own OS is called... FOR SURE.
I see, so what this article is saying is that Engadget - and a lot of the other tech blogs - got this wrong because they took one throw away comment quoted by one source as gospel.
OK then.
Oh yeah, and Bada isn't really an OS. It's a UI layer.
I wonder if it's wise to use it in upcoming Symbian versions - of course, now that Symbian is open source, companies can use what ever UI they like.
this just proves that engadget editors and bloggers are ignorants... always talking trash about symbian and nokia.. and always defending apple and the iphone.. its lame