Nokia to buy and unify Symbian, and what this means for N-Gage
Published by Tzer2 at 17:40 BST, June 24th 2008
You may have seen Nokia making the news today as they've announced they're going to buy the operating system maker Symbian. This is tremendously important because all N-Gage-compatible phones run on the Symbian OS, and what happens to Symbian will ultimately determine what happens to N-Gage too.
History Lesson
Before we get onto the implications for N-Gage, here's a bit of history and clarification over what's going on.
There are actually three main stories today:
1) Nokia is going to buy the Symbian company, who make the Symbian operating system
Symbian was founded in 1998 by an alliance of mobile phone manufacturers including Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson (before they went into a joint venture with Sony), and the British personal organiser manufacturer Psion. Other phone makers including Samsung and Panasonic later bought shares in the company, and some non-shareholders bought licences to manufacture Symbian-compatible phones.
The idea of Symbian was to provide an operating system for pocket computers that had phones built into them, which are nowadays known as "smartphones". Symbian was also perhaps intended to stop Microsoft taking over the mobile computing world the way they took over the desktop computing world.
Nokia already owned about half of Symbian, but they're now buying all the other Symbian shares from the company's other owners.
2) A new organisation called the Symbian Foundation is to be created, which will unify all the various flavours of Symbian into one single platform (currently there are three: S60, UIQ and MOAP)
Due to disagreements over what kind of smartphones they wanted to make, the original founders of Symbian decided to produce several flavours of Symbian which would have the same operating system but different interfaces.
Ericsson (later to join forces with Sony to found Sony Ericsson) wanted to produce a touchscreen PDA-like device, whereas Nokia wanted to make normal-looking phones. Ericsson's devices used Symbian UIQ, while Nokia's used Symbian S60.
However, in the ten years since the founding of Symbian, both UIQ and S60 have started to overlap on each other's territory: S60 phones are about to get touchscreens, and some of the most recent UIQ phones are normal-looking non-touch models. It no longer makes any sense to have two separate versions of Symbian like this, which is why they're unifying them.
This means that all Symbian phones in the future will be compatible with each other, you won't have to worry about which kind of Symbian they use because there will only be one kind.
The original generation of N-Gage used the first version of Symbian S60, called S60v1, while the new N-Gage platform has the third version of Symbian S60, called S60v3.
3) Symbian is to be turned into an open source operating system
After Nokia buys Symbian, it's turning it over to a new organisation called the Symbian Foundation. They will be responsible for unifying the different kinds of Symbian (see above), and they will also make Symbian into an "open source" operating system.
"Open source" means that the inner workings of an operating system or program are available for the whole world to see and tinker with, and companies increasingly make their software open source so that they can collaborate with other companies and individuals on improving it. It saves time and money because everyone is working on the same product, so the product gets developed more quickly and easily.
Anyone can distribute or alter open source software, which makes it possible for competing versions to appear. This openness also usually makes the software more reliable and more secure because problems can be fixed as soon as they're spotted.
A group photo of some older Symbian-based phones. Note the N-Gage QD on the right, as the original generation of N-Gage used Symbian S60v1. The new N-Gage platform uses Symbian S60v3.
So, what does this mean for N-Gage?
Perhaps the most significant announcement today is the attempt to unify the different kinds of Symbian into one platform. It would theoretically allow N-Gage to spread to lots of non-Nokia phones, even phones in Japan which has previously been an N-Gage-free zone.
Why would Nokia want to do that though? Well, the main reason is that phones are getting very cheap very quickly. In 10 or 20 years time even advanced phones might be as cheap as pocket calculators are today, which would mean much less profit for the manufacturers.
To get round this problem, Nokia has recently said and done a lot to turn themselves into a software and internet service company. If they start making more money selling software than selling phones, then it would make perfect business sense to sell software (including N-Gage games) on non-Nokia devices. Unifying Symbian into one platform would help that tremendously.
So, if it's still around in a decade or two, N-Gage may become an internet service on a wide range of devices from many different manufacturers.
When will this unification happen?
We shouldn't get too excited right now though as the unification of Symbian isn't expected to happen before 2010.
And one little interesting game-related nugget about the Symbian Foundation...
The new Symbian Foundation website has a list of companies backing the new organisation, take a look at the name in the circle:
Categories: Miscellaneous, Industry, Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: N-Gage
News Discussion
For some strange reason, Nokia seems to want to keep N-Gage exclusive to a select few models. There are plenty of S60 3rd phones out there that are technically powerful enough to be N-Gage compatible, but for some reason they aren't.
Unification of Symbian won't happen until 2010. Nokia becoming mainly a software company probably wouldn't happen until 2020 or 2030, if ever.
By that stage phones may be so cheap that we don't really care who we buy them from or which model we have.
| For some strange reason, Nokia seems to want to keep N-Gage exclusive to a select few models. There are plenty of S60 3rd phones out there that are technically powerful enough to be N-Gage compatible, but for some reason they aren't. |
If the N-Gage app does spread to other current models, the 6120 would be an obvious choice, it will probably be later rather than sooner as they're still trying to get the current version to work fully! :-)
One thing's for certain, Nokia are definitely NOT trying to keep N-Gage exclusive to expensive models. The 5320 due out soon will be the cheapest S60 phone so far (200 euros launch price) and it will be N-Gage compatible, it even has N-Gage gaming buttons. That's the kind of thing that will help it get to the mass market.
What will probably happen is N-Gage will be added to more and more phones as they're designed with the app in mind.
| While many have concluded that single chipped phones like the Nokia N81 lack a 3D chip, it came as a huge discovery that this device actually does have a 3D Chip |
As for the processors, a higher clock speed doesn't mean a faster processor. The N95's dual processors mean it can get most stuff done more quickly than the N81.
|
Originally Posted by Cad..d-_-b..
While many have concluded that single chipped phones like the Nokia N81 lack a 3D chip, it came as a huge discovery that this device actually does have a 3D Chip. Apart from having a faster processor than the dual chipped N95s and N82s, a 3D chip is present in the i.Mx... chip variant embedded in the N81. Question is does the 6120 also contain this?
|
N81 doesn't use Freescale i.Mx. Neither do any other Nokia phone (as far as I know). N81, 6120 and the other phones use Freescale i.300-30 or possibly Freescale MXC300-30. But I don't think we seen any MXC300-30 phones on the market yet, but they Nokia & Freescale showed the platform together on the Mobile World Congress 2008 back in february so we will no doubt see phones using it some day.
Also, if I'm wrong and the phones actually do use i.Mx, there are 8 different i.Mx models and only one of them have a 3D chip in it and a ARM CPU running at 400-532 MHz. Since N81 and the others run at 369 MHz, they can't be running that particular i.Mx platform.
By the way, I think you're a bit wasted on All About N-Gage. Games are ok in their place but lots of us just don't get the time to play them. Please get back to doing your thorough reviews and making your perceptive comments on All About Symbian.
|
Originally Posted by Cad..d[+_+]b
And Kazu dude, please relax and do sufficient research.
|
And a moderator on the on the forums of the speculation thread you linked to, seem to think the same.