Uncertainty shrouds Symbian future

Uncertainty surrounds the future of the Symbian platform as the head of Symbian Foundation resigned, and now Nokia accelerated its progress to become an OS neutral firm, and revealed a job cutting programme that specifies the Symbian unit as a key target, writes Rethink Wireless.

Samsung and Sony Ericsson have both backed away from the newly open source Symbian 3 in recent weeks, focusing their efforts on Android. This was not a fatal blow for Symbian, given how much of its development and its sales rely on Nokia, but it weakened the attempt, by putting the platform into an open source foundation, to present it as vendor neutral, the report says.

Nokia itself has been pursuing a multiple OS route for years, signalled most strongly when it acquired Trolltech, maker of the cross-platform development framework, Qt. According to the report, it is now accelerating the progress to put Qt, not an individual OS, at the heart of its strategy; to create a common framework between Symbian and its new Linux-based OS MeeGo; and eventually, probably, to become entirely OS neutral.

Liquidware, an open source engineering firm, has released an open source hardware Android development platform, says SF Gate.

The Android Modular Gadget Platform is said to be the first commercially available modular development kit based entirely on open source software and hardware reference designs. The platform is designed for rapid prototyping Android systems.

The gadget platform is designed around five main modules, each of which can connect directly to each other to facilitate rapid development. Those modules include an organic LED touchscreen, an ARM carrier board, a lithium ion battery, USB hub, and wireless G card module. When combined, the company says these modules create a fully networked Android gadget capable of running any and all APK Android app files.

A developer at Facebook is taking issue with how people keep saying that Android is 'open', states Tom's Guide.

Joe Hewitt, a developer now at Facebook, helped open source projects like Mozilla's Firefox. He has had experience with open source projects, and he doesn't feel that Android is as open as people say it is.

Hewitt tweeted: “Until Android is read/write open, it's no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell. Compare the Android 'open source' model to Firefox or Linux if you want to see how disingenuous that 'open' claim is. I think it is the lack of visibility into daily progress that bothers me about Android more than the lack of write access.”