Earlier this month, the world’s most popular smartphone operating system, Symbian, chose to go

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the open source way. But what does this really mean? Nokia claims that this will bring even more innovation, applications and services to the devices, as well as even more appealing devices to the market with these technologies.

The unified and open platform will include Symbian OS components as well as the various user interfaces contributed by individual companies—S60 (Nokia), UIQ (UIQ Technologies; seen in various Sony Ericsson, Motorola, BenQ and other such phones) and MOAP(S) (NTT DoCoMo). Though Nokia, at present, dominates the development of the platform, the Symbian Foundation hopes to reduce it to 50 per cent by next year.

Nokia’s involvement with Symbian goes back to 2008 when they acquired the company, and the Symbian Foundation was subsequently launched, an independent non-profit company to oversee the development of the OS and its eventual transition to open source. Foundation members include Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

Despite owning a very significant proportion of the smartphone user base, Symbian has often been tagged as “yesterday’s technology”, and industry observers have been waiting and watching for new blood to edge it out slowly. Today, Symbian accounts for a market share of 45 per cent, which translates into 330 million smartphone users. However, rivals have popped up on the horizon and are gaining on Symbian, including the iPhone (17 per cent) and the open source Android (4 per cent), the latter tipped to be the greatest threat not just to Symbian, but other platforms. If the projections of Gartner, the IT research people, is correct, by 2012 Android’s share will have leapt forward to 14.5 per cent, leaving others to take a hit — Symbian’s popularity will have dipped to 39 per cent, the iPhone’s to 14 per cent.

Opening up might just be the adrenaline Symbian required, for it will now reap the greatest advantage of open source software — a large community of programmers and developers invested in the evolution of the OS. With no restrictions on the code, interested parties are free to experiment and innovate. This is very likely to stem the rot that many observers were worried about.

Also, a user base of 330 million users cannot be scoffed away easily, especially given the popularity of Symbian platforms in emerging markets. The opening of the source code unlocks an incredible opportunity for app developers. As seen in the case of Android, working with an open source OS allows mobile phone makers to tweak the software to their requirements and also develop apps easily and at lower costs by not having to pay licence fees. Though following in the footsteps of Apple’s App Store is a distant dream in the present scenario, one could at the very least expect a spate of new applications and innovations related to Symbian. It also increases the life span of the platform, since companies might find it more sensible building on the market base already existing rather than shelling out on brand new R&D.

It is early days yet for the open source Symbian, and while there is no harm in having an optimistic outlook, it would be foolish to think that the likes of Android and iPhone are going to make it easy. Waiting and watching is the call of the hour.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer