The Symbian show is on again this year - with the Symbian Foundation promoting it's new open source colours.
The show has been heavy on promoting ideas, features and collaboration with industry partners, but in the rush to embrace open source, seems to have lost some vision and focus.
While Symbian execs are quick to criticise Android and iPhone there seems to be less clarity of what Symbian's focus is. The keynote on Tuesday highlighted 466 new features as being a great thing for the next releases.
In the buzz around new ideas the key advantage that Symbian has - that comes from it's long track record in producing Smartphones.
If we compare the two "low cost" smartphone challengers we see
Both of these are touch screen devices, with application support and great Webkit based browsers. When we compare the typical price a consumer might pay for an unsubsidised version of these handsets we see the difference - the HTC Tattoo typically sells at around €200, while the 5800 typically sells at €150
Symbian has the ability to go lower down the price bracket with smartphone devices too - devices such as the 6730 that use QVGA displays, but still with rich web browsers have the functionality of €500 smartphone devices from 2007, but can now achieve prices close to €100
All this innovation being pushed down to the low cost end of the market creates a great opportunity for developers - Symbian, the first people to bring smartphones to the market, are also going to be the first people to bring smartphones to the mass market - the prepay market in western europe, and the mass markets in India, China, Russia and Brazil.
This open innovation, and mass scale with rich API's and functionality is the opportunity for Symbian, and for developers on Symbian's platform. It is a great pity that this message did not come across from the keynote at the Symbian show.
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