Right, yesterday, I did a blog post about Samsung’s new, upcoming phone OS, called Bada. And I theorised that just maybe, they were aiming to use it to being feature phones up to the level of their smartphones, giving them a similar feature set. However, what I didn’t predict was that there’d be a casualty of the introduction of Bada. And it’s quite a shocking one.
According to The Register, the OS that Samsung are axing from their line-up is, shockingly, Symbian…
It started with a product roadmap, which phones running on Android, WinMo and Bada, but there wasn’t a trace of a snifter of a Symbian phone. Which came as something of a surprise, until Samsung VP Don Joo Lee confirmed it, saying they were giving up Symbian, to focus on Android, WinMo and Bada.
Well, paint me purple and call me Susan, I never expected that!
So, anyway, Samsung’s phone roster is going to be spread out pretty much as I expected (other than the obvious missing name on there, now): WinMo will be used for their more business-focused phones, since that’s an area where it still has the edge; Android’ll be used for their top-end consumer smartphones; and Bada will be used for the bridge between smartphones and feature phones, the territory current phones like the Jet and the Samsung i8910 HD sit in.
The question is, why have they taken this decision? Well, it’s tempting to think that, because Samsung want to take on Nokia for the top spot, in terms of phone sales, they won’t want to be using the OS that’s completely owned by Nokia. I’ll be honest, I do find that argument fairly compelling, although I doubt Samsung will quite phrase it like that. More importantly, what it is, what it actually comes down to being, is a massive body-blow to Symbian. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung were three of their big partners, and with Samsung dropping ‘em (not to mention Nokia dropping Symbian in favour of Maemo, in the new Nokia N900), it’s hard to see today’s news as anything other than a massive kick in the clackers for that OS.
Still, in the short term, there’s one thing we can take away from this, and it’s that we should cherish the i8910 HD while we still can, because I had a play with one recently, and it’s a phenomenal phone. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best Symbian phone ever, bar none.
It’s just a shame it’ll also be Samsung’s last, but hey, if the Samsung/Symbian partnership has to end, there are worse phones it could end on…
(A big thank you to blog reader Jed for spotting this story before me, so he gets the credit.)
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