Several recent announcements have cast an unfavorable light on Symbian Ltd., a maker of operating systems for a number of wireless devices. But even with the added illumination, it’s still unclear whether the company is in for rough times or smooth sailing.
Last month, the company’s main stakeholder, personal digital assistant company Psion plc, dropped its plans to build a smart phone using the Symbian operating system and said it was moving out of the market for handheld devices. And last week, reports surfaced that Motorola Inc., another Symbian stakeholder that has fallen on hard times, moved to block a Symbian initial public offering.
Symbian officials denied the IPO reports, saying that it would come when the time was right.
“Symbian has consistently said the company would go public when market conditions were favorable and when there were volume shipments of Symbian-based devices,” said Trevor Strudley, Symbian’s director of market development for North America. “We currently have an investor relations PR (public relations) group in place and will move forward as appropriate.”
But the question remains: Is Symbian doing OK? A variety of companies, including several Symbian stakeholders and licensees, released their first round of GPRS devices-and not one featured a Symbian operating system. Symbian officials are looking toward the future, hoping additional devices will use the company’s operating system, but whether Symbian can ultimately compete with OS heavyweights Palm Inc. and Microsoft Corp. remains to be seen.
“There’s a lot of bumps in the road here” for Symbian, said industry analyst Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing for Gartner Inc.
But those bumps may not spell the end for the company, he said.
“I don’t think they’re going away tomorrow,” Dulaney said.
Symbian officials boast that the company’s technology is currently being developed in a variety of products.
“We have visibility across more than 20 different projects,” Strudley said.
In addition, Symbian has the backing of the world’s major device manufacturers, including L.M. Ericsson and Nokia Corp., and its licensees are legion: Kenwood Corp., Panasonic, Philips Consumer Communications, Sanyo Corp., Sony Corp. and-Symbian’s newest-Siemens AG. Strudley said 75 percent of the world’s device makers are Symbian licensees.
However, there are only a few devices now on the shelves that use a Symbian OS, and most are Psion’s PDAs. Ericsson’s R380s smart phone, which is available in Europe, works on Symbian’s OS, and Nokia’s 9210 Communicator, which is scheduled for release this year, will feature the operating system.
Strudley said the company expects a variety of Symbian-powered devices will be introduced this year. However, none of the company’s licensees have publicly said they will use a Symbian operating system in their GPRS offerings.
The general trend so far for manufacturers has been to develop their own proprietary operating system, which they say is cheaper than licensing one. This trend will soon end, Strudley said, because the development situation is becoming too complex.
“The cost of maintaining the OS and the applications … it becomes a nightmare because your engineering team just keeps growing and growing,” he said. “If you have a lone proprietary system, there’s less of a chance to get into this open applications services market.”
And that’s where Symbian comes in, Strudley said. The company is making arrangements with all the applications developers and peripheral areas of device development so its licensees don’t have to. This reduces the cost to each individual licensee, he said.
Strudley said Symbian will really come into its own in the next few years when smart phones, which are a combination of mobile phones and PDAs, become more commonplace. Strudley said the company expects smart phones to become the world’s standard communication device in three to five years. Analyst firm IDC predicts the market for “smart” handheld devices will grow to $26 billion by 2004, and Verizon Wireless said the recently released Kyocera 6035 smart phones are selling like hotcakes, even with the $500 price tag.
However, Gartner’s Dulaney said the market may not be as fruitful as some might think.
“The real question is whether smart phones are going to be big at all,” he said. “You might find them to be impractical.”
Gartner predicts Symbian will hold 15 percent of the smart-phone market by the end of 2002, behind the better known Palm and Microsoft brands. And the main obstacle Symbian faces, Dulaney said, is brand awareness.
“They’ve really done a poor job of really raising (the image of) their company,” he said, adding that Palm and Microsoft have been much better at branding their names.
Symbian has generally let the device maker do the talking while staying hidden in the background, Dulaney said-a strategy that isn’t in the company’s best interest.
“I think they really need to reverse that strategy,” he said.
