For one, not only is the Symbian Foundation tweaking the Symbian
operating system to run on devices with larger displays, work is also
being done to let the OS run natively on a larger variety of
processors. Indeed, engineers recently managed to get an unmodified
copy of the base OS to run on an Intel Atom processor--the chip powering the majority of netbooks on the market today.
At the moment, Symbian appears to be in a mode of experimentation
and development. Moving ahead, the path that it is plotting does appear
to set it squarely against the likes of Microsoft's Windows and
Google's Android operating systems, both of which also have Smartphone
and Mobile Internet Device (MID) centric equivalents.
On the other hand, some analysts view Symbian's move as a purely
defensive one, rather than any stroke of genius. Jim Zemlin, who is the
executive director of the Linux Foundation, elaborates: "Smartphones
are starting to work like PCs, and PCs like smartphones."
Philip Solis, principal analyst at ABI probably summed up the entire
situation when he said, "MIDs could displace smartphones the way
smartphones displaced PDAs."
Nokia will not comment on when it may enter into the new device categories.
To read more:
- check out this article from BusinessWeek
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Article by Paul Mah for 