I’ve just returned from a day in San fran where I had a chance to attend a special Symbian Partner event… interesting timing for this event as just this week the Nokia purchase of Symbian became final (ie. a done deal). Also of interest with the event was the presence of a keynote speaker from AT&T, coincidentally, just today AT&T has announced the company will be moving/opening a major office in Dallas, TX, home of corporate HQ for Nokia.
Much todo has been made about Nokia trying to catch up with Apple and the iPhone in the US marketplace, however, this may not be a simple task. Nokia has announced their “iPhone killer”, the Nokia N97 touch UI smartphone (and much more), however, I’ll make a guess that it will be sometime before this device is spotted in use here in North America. Furthermore, until Joe U.S. Consumer can get himself an S60 smartphone for about $200 (subsidized) these amazing devices simply won’t wind up in the hands of American consumers. Too bad as S60 smartphones are true mobile workhorses and are a fine compliment to any power mobile user, particularly needing location-aware applications and services. Moving forward, Nokia is going to need more than a touch UI smartphone to gain some penetration in the US and start taking advantage of their ownership of NAVTEQ and their new role in creating the Symbian Foundation (think open source OS) – recall Nokia has turned the Symbian OS over to the Open Source Community similar to what we saw a few years ago with Autodesk and Mapguide and the creation of OSGeo. Enough on that topic, if you’re interested, a number of images from San Fran and Symbian Partner Event are now up on the flickr… enjoy and have a great week-end. More on symbian event soon…
