UI of course is an area where Symbian is perceived to be lagging behind competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android, and the Palm Pre’s Web OS. It’s also something so fundamental to the user experience that it seems odd, even in a small way, to farm this out to the community.

My fear is that, like many an open source project, you could end up with ‘design by committee’.

It’s seems to be the exact opposite approach to that taken by Steve Jobs and Apple, for example. Can you imagine Jobs inviting Apple fan boys for their UI contributions?

Here’s what Scott Weiss, UI Technology Manager at the Symbian Foundation, told IntoMobile earlier this month on the issue of UI design:

It is up to the community to take it forward. I’m here to help guide and support but… my title is not principle designer. I’m not an authoritative figure but I am an influencer and a supporter and a custodian of the User Interface, which is community-owned.

(via IntoMobile)

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Naraye then goes on to name names, citing Android, Nokia’s Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm’s WebOS as among the first smartphones to “support web browsing with the newsest Flash player.”

Missing in action is RIM’s BlackBerry and, less surprising, Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices. Apple’s official line has always been that the full version of Flash player – not the underpowered and less well supported Flash Lite – is too processor intensive to run properly on a smartphone, leading to a significant drain on battery life. However, with the new iPhone 3GS (the “S” stands for speed) that would appear to be less on an issue.

Instead, as we all should know by now, the real reason why Apple doesn’t want to embrace Adobe’s Flash is that it would offer third-party developers an alternative “runtime” on which to develop and, perhaps more importantly, distrubute apps for the iPhone, bypassing Apple’s control (and that of its partner carriers) and the iTunes App Store itself. And we can’t have that, can we? Instead, it’s been reported that Apple may be planning to add support for Flash video in particular through an update to the iPhone’s version of Apple’s QuickTime.

As for why RIM hasn’t jumped on board, well that’s anybody’s guess, although I’d suggest that making a decent web browser for BlackBerry – you know, one that renders HTML properly – should be a priority for RIM over adding the bells and whistles of Flash.

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The ambition, says Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is to create “the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications.”

To achieve this, Nokia will join other industry players, initially AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, to form the non-profit Symbian Foundation, although any company can join.

Together the foundation will unify the Symbian OS with its various competing User Interface layers – primarily Nokia’s S60 and Motorola and Sony Ericsson’s UIQ – into a single open platform for “converged mobile devices”. The new foundation, in which Nokia has the biggest seat since it will swallow up all of Symbian’s current employees, will oversee the process of releasing the new OS under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 open source license – a transition that will take two years – and become its long-term custodian.

“Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet and indeed today Symbian OS leads its market by any measure”, said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian in a written statement. “Today’s announcement is a bold new step to achieve that vision by embracing a complete and proven platform, offered in an open way, designed to stimulate innovation.”

Note that Clifford didn’t say that he wanted the new the Symbian to become the most widely used mobile platform on the planet. Instead, the vision is clearly to become the most widely used software platform period. That’s because the Mobile Web is the future of software, a future made explicit on the Symbian Foundation’s new Website:

The demand for converged mobile devices is accelerating. By 2010 we expect four billion people to have joined the global mobile conversation. For many of these people, their mobile will be their first Internet experience, not just their first camera, music player or phone.

It’s also a future that Google is all too aware of – hence Android and the Open Handset Alliance – along with Apple with its iPhone, and don’t count out Microsoft just yet (although most tech pundits seem to have done) with its deep pockets and Windows Mobile platform.

Developers, developers, developers

The platform will be free and open to develop on from the start whether you are enthusiast, web designer, professional developer or service provider.

Although Nokia’s Kai Öistämo, Executive Vice President, didn’t perform a Ballmer-like monkey dance at this morning’s press briefing, a big reason behind the move to open-source Symbian is to attract third-party developers away from competing platforms. A constant message from Nokia and other members of the new foundation was that by unifying Symbian and giving it away for free, the aim is to remove any remaining friction that maybe slowing down innovation. Or as one company executive put it, handset makers and networks will be able to spend considerably less time on the piping and more time on applications and services. And of course it’s applications and services (paid or ad-supported) not operating systems where the real money is.

All of which leads us back to the most obvious question: Isn’t open-sourcing Symbian a knee-jerk response to the Google-led Android and its open-source and developer friendly strategy and/or Apple’s innovation?

Not at all, stressed Öistämo. To call it a response simply doesn’t do it justice, since the move to open-source an incumbent platform the size of Symbian was unparalleled. To paraphrase: “The old business model served us well for the last ten years and the new model will do the same going forward”.

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