Motorola turns its back on Symbian, embraces Android

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Motorola turns its back on Symbian, embraces Android

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By Thomas Newton (Thursday, 30th October 2008)

In a brave attempt to reverse this current run of falling sales worldwide, Motorola have announced a series of changes that it hopes will reverse its recent fortunes; chief among these changes sees the US-based mobile giant controversially opting to use the as of yet unproven Android OS on their flagship smartphones from now on, instead of Symbian.

Additionally, it is thought that all Motorola business handsets will run on Windows Mobile (despite recent reports that Windows Mobile 7 won't see the light of day till 2010), and all low-end budget handsets will be using Motorola's own P2K platform.

This presumably means that Motorola's forthcoming and as of yet unnamed 'social smart phone', featuring a touchscreen smartphone, slide-out keyboard and fully integrated social networking features (doesn't sound like the G1 at all, does it?), will come with the Android OS running under the hood.

It has to be said that throwing your lot in with a totally new OS seems more than just a tad cavalier when the chips are down and the world economy at large ain't too great, but maybe its to do with the fact that Motorola feel more at home working with another US-based team (the majority of the other Symbian Foundation members are based in Europe); perhaps they're thinking of the environment instead of racking up the old air miles.

More than likely is that the move to focus on just three operating systems will result in mass layoffs of the designers and teams that had been working on handsets intended to run on Symbian and other OS platforms.

Symbian was initially founded in 1998 by Motorola along with Scandinavian powerhouses Nokia and Ericsson, and British PDA developers Psion; earlier this year Nokia acquired all of the remaining shares, with the intention of donating the Symbian OS free to the forthcoming Symbian Foundation, a non-profit "royalty-free open platform" designed to "accelerate innovation", in order to remain competitive against Apple and Android.