Long time back, Google announced its open mobile platform - The Android. Today, one may get its SDK off their website. Symbian, feeling a threat to their already well established market did the unthinkable. They too made their platform open source. So, in the battle of the 2 open source platforms, which would finally emerge as the winner?
- from developer.mimer.com
- from gizmodo.com
While Symbian focuses on ease of use and rich features, Android focuses on complete touch functionality with several applications. Till now, Android only has test versions out, which are a little buggy. An official stable release is expected later this year. So who will be the king of the mobile platform?
Personally, I feel that a mobile platform cannot be judged on the basis of emulator performance and sadly that is what I had to work on. I have used Symbian OS since the launch of the 3650. Needless to say it was quite an improvement when compared to my old 3310. The old Symbian OS had several problems, like slow software, somewhat erratic operation. The new one however, is pretty good. It boasts of better performance and stable software.
The Android, which is still in development stages, has some problems at the moment. I couldn't even figure out how to turn off Google Maps :D.
Just when Android was looking to be the leader of the mobile platform, Symbian went open source. This will be a major bump to Android, since Symbian already has a decent market share.
In my humble opinion, it will be very hard for Android to capture the market initially, since the hardware that it uses is somewhat similar to the Windows Mobile Platform, and it does not come cheap! Symbian may continue with their current hardware (eg. ARM in case of Nokia).
Symbian has its own structure, but Android uses the rock solid Linux Kernel 2.6.x. This will definitely invite geeks and technology enthusiasts like us to choose Android over Symbian.
It will be an interesting battle to say the least. Let's all look forward to it.. :D
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