The Hindu Business Line : All techno-eggs in one basket?

Nokia is the world’s undisputed handset leader, 4 of 10 mobile phones sold anywhere, roll out of a Nokia factory – 5 million a month from its Indian plant in Sriperumbudur, alone. And 6 out of 10 smart phones have Symbian software running inside. While promoting its own software platform, S60, Nokia has been acquiring the largest single chunk of the UK-based Symbian for some time and already owned almost 48 per cent. Now it will acquire the remaining 52 per cent... and it promises that it is doing so only to release Symbian to the public domain, as a royalty-free open platform.

If Intel and Microsoft had announced that the one had bought the other, the world would have yelped in protest and regulators would have leaped to prevent it. Here is the biggest product maker acquiring the biggest software albeit in a different mobile arena. But don’t expect howls of outrage.

This is part of quiet consolidation happening in the cellular space where the bigger worry for handset makers be they Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola or Sony Ericsson is the rise and rise of Apple’s iPhone in the public’s fancy – and the slow but steady moves of the Web giant Google to foster its own single standard for mobile phones.

Apple’s platform is proprietary. Google’s Android promises to be open. Symbian by comparison – even in its post acquisition avatar – is the devil one knows and understands. This is why all major handset makers have rallied under the Symbian foundation flag.

Also worth remembering is that most phone makers offer sets for different software platforms – and this includes Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, which unlike Vista is a robust and generally liked environment. Let’s not forget the slow but steady growth in popularity of Linux as a mobile platform. It may have no godfathers, but its acceptance could yet surprise us all.

How will all this be viewed by Indians – the world’s largest community of mobile application developers? Recent developer jamborees hosted by Nokia as well as the first MotoDev event in India testify to the huge human resource that mobile players like these can address in this country.

Hitherto, software and application developers needed to rewrite code three or more ways so that the application would work under Windows Mobile or Symbian; Nokia’s S60 or UIQ the graphical interface for Symbian created by Motorola and Sony Ericsson or NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP(S). Now presumably the Symbian foundation will be a one stop shop for developer resources across these environments...in the fullness of time they may morph into one standard.

Mr D. Shivakumar, Managing Director Nokia India, told Business Line: “India’s skilled developer community should find the development a boon – it can now work in unified open environment that will act as a multiplier, reaching their applications to a much larger user community.”

That will make life easier (and more lucrative) for India’s mobile whizz kids even as it reduces the pain of switching or upgrading handsets for lay consumers. Sometimes it makes sense to put all the eggs – or most of them – in one technology basket.

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