Nokia seizes control of Symbian

Nokia seizes control of Symbian, at last!

The OS war of Symbian vs Microsoft Smartphone (well, in terms of company Nokia vs Microsoft), and the development infrastructure war of Java (J2ME) vs Windows Mobile (.Net Compact Framework) would continue.

There is a good reason that phone manufacturers likely would choose both Symbian and Microsoft Smartphone as some sort of hedging to minimize platform risk, J2ME has an advantage of being platform neutral, though it is still limited comparing to the natives. Between Symbian and Microsoft Smartphone, the former now captures larger market share, the latter has better developer support and ready-to-go both R&D and marketing arm - I always recall Bill Gates has repeated "invest" three times on MDC 2003.

Nobody can tell who is going to win in the end. The primary driving force would still be the average consumer delightly gets hold of the toy, and the developers deligently seek the killer applications and marches into the enterprise world - where end-to-end application development is still much unexplored.