Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 07-07-2009

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Rumours of a symbiosis between Nokia and Android keep popping up every once in a while, but it is ever more clear that Symbian will always be their platform of choice. A sentiment echoed by Nokia when they said, “everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices.” Nokia has denied any such rumours, again.

Nokia had recently (December 2008) acquired Symbian Ltd. for $410 million and founded the Symbian Foundation to foster a growth of open-source (and otherwise) development for the Symbian Platform, without any royalty fees. This is a rather large sign of their commitment to Symbian.

Nokia had also recently purchased, for a sum of  € 104 million, the Qt toolkit which is used for some popular software such as KDE, Google Earth, Skype, Adobe Photoshop Album, and so on. They have since released Qt under the LGPL license, making it a much more attractive platform for open-source developers. In fact they intend to soon make their Symbian operating system open source too, meaning that you could soon see customized versions developed for some of the more popular mobiles.

Their entire strategy has been to open up development opportunities for Nokia mobiles using Symbian operating system as their platform. However they all support the aim of Qt to be a fully cross-platform development toolkit. Software written in Qt can already be targeted for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and even mobile platform such as Windows CE, and their own Symbian S60. They are even working on support for the Maemo Linux OS used in their Internet tablets.

With such a huge investment from Nokia, it is doubtful that they would abandon Symbian already and move to Android. However open-source is all about choice, and Nokia has already started treading down the open-source path. Choice is always something that will dominate. Any mobile which allows running multiple operating systems is sure to be popular, and so is an operating system which will run on multiple mobiles. 

While it is unlikely that Nokia would abandon Symbain any time soon, or even at all, merely giving people the choice to run Android on their Nokia mobile is sure to make Nokia's smartphones even more attractive. In the future we hope we will see not only mobile phones which can run different operating systems, but those which can run multiple of them at the same time. Come back here in 2015 for a dual-booting guide to your Nokia N1000!

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