Posted on Friday, Oct 23, 2009 by Rene Ritchie
File Under:News; Tags: android, Apple, being evil, gigaom, Google, greed, iPhone, Symbian, The competition
Lee Williams, executive director at Symbian, sits down with GigaOM’s Om Malik, and gets candid — really candid — about Apple and Google:
“Android is building a perfect storm of fragmentation. I don’t view Apple as evil, just greedy. Google … Come on.”
He claims his opinion is informed by his conversations with large carriers who complain that they have to provide Apple App Store apps to iPhone users yet derive no income from them (we’d point out they made money off the data plans — dumb pipes!), and that Google is taking away their customer interface, “cookie-ing” them (tracking their online activities) via proprietary apps obscured in lip service to “openness” and using that to feed their advertising business.
When asked why companies like HTC, if they know Google is “evil”, aren’t investing in Symbian instead, Williams advises Om to “wait and see”, and thinks those manufacturers might be interested in “very open systems.”
While offering no advice to Apple, he does invite Google to join the Symbian foundation so they can have a voice in that open system. Somehow we doubt he’ll see them take up that offer any time soon.
Harsh words for competitors, but also strangely refreshing to see on camera. As to the iPhone, is the carrier beef legitimate? Should they be getting a cut of App Store profits, or should they be happy with the huge increase in data revenue the iPhone is already bringing them?
Nokia dominates the planet when it comes not only to cellphones, but also to Smartphones. But the upcoming iPhone Risk-style onslaught (not to mention the pending release of Android, though delayed) looks to have them a little worried. So they’re finally getting their Symbian ducks in a row: enough of trying to work together with other companies like Sony and Motorola, they’ve purchased the entire OS shootin’ match and are unifying the platform. Simple explanation: Symbian is the base OS, then there are different interfaces on top of that: S60 and UIQ. We’re not fond of either, but between the two of them S60 seems to be the one with more legs (and more support, it’s Nokia’s interface of choice).
Update: we’ve got more to say here, so make the jump for the analysis.
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figure 1: iPhone vs. HTC Touch vs. Nokia N95
According to an article in ComputerWorld, the iPhone handily beat other smartphones (printable version) in almost all of the usability categories. The iphone competed against the HTC Touch (Windows Mobile) and the Nokia N95 (S60 Symbian) in usability tests performed by Texas-based Perceptive Sciences. Their test group was with ten people that had never used any of the three phones, so it’s unfortunately a fairly small sample size. The article title gives the net result away, but read on for the highlights from their test.
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