Symbian has been working away quietly on creating an open source platform to rival Android and prevent the Google upstart stealing all its dominant share of the smartphone OS market. It is almost ready to unleash its offerings on the world, hoping to divert some of the limelight from Android, with the beta release of the first open source iteration, Symbian ^2, due within weeks. And it has put flesh behind its previous, vague, hints of entering the content distribution and app store fields, with an initiative called Horizon.
The current version of Symbian OS has 49.3% share of the smartphone market, according to Gartner, and features on 70 handsets in 26 countries, with Europe its heartland. Predictably, Symbian’s first customer for store-related services was Nokia with Ovi Store, and it is also working with Samsung on Application Store and – significantly, given AT&T’s recent shifts towards wide scale Symbian adoption – that operator’s Media Mall.
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