Announcements flowed from the Symbian Smartphone Show in London this week, but one was still left with the feeling that the Symbian Foundation is curiously out of step with the rest of the mobile industry.
Lee Williams is the new head of the Foundation. Perhaps it is no surprise he comes from Nokia, but this raised eyebrows and questions about the Foundation's independence from the world's biggest handset maker, as well how open the converted- to-open source Symbian platform truly would be to other members of the Foundation.
The focus on housekeeping while Apple with its app store and RIM and Google¹s marketplaces are busily opening their platforms or planning to do so in the near future is worrying.
To make matters worse, there have been complaints that Symbian is much harder and more complicated for developers to work with than the other platforms. Also, its marketshare is falling and all the others¹ is rising.
Those may prove to be two big reasons for developers to concentrate their efforts elsewhere as economic conditions worsen.