Despite worries Samsung stays with Symbian mobile OS

We reported yesterday on Samsung’s upcoming developer-friendly mobile platform, bada. Samsung responded today to fears that it may be gearing to abandon the open-source Symbian OS in favour of bada, by saying that it intends to continue with both in a “multi-OS” strategy.

What’s going on here?

Symbian is an open-source operating system for mobile devices, maintained by the Symbian Foundation. It has been around (in one form or another) since 2001, and Samsung has been been involved with Symbian since it acquired a stake in 2003.

The manufacturer has been releasing devices powered by Symbian since late 2005. But with the launch of the bada platform, there came rumours that Samsung was dropping Symbian entirely - and that it would be moving exclusively to bada, Android and Windows Mobile.

But Samsung responded to those rumours today, to multiple people who inquired, with the following paragraph:

“Samsung is an initial member of Symbian Foundation and continues to cooperate with Symbian Foundation. At the same time, Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile. To provide more choices to meet consumers’ many different tastes and preferences, we will continue our ‘multi-OS’ strategy. Our policy is to provide what consumers want when they need.”

What we think?

Samsung has a wonderful history of open-ness, from Symbian to the Joint Innovation Lab - but sometimes you have to listen to old sayings like “too many cooks spoil the broth”. Samsung really is spreading it’s inventory of annual devices across a lot of different platforms and OSs. Perhaps next year, as the high-end device market further matures, we’ll see Samsung start to reduce back down to the big sellers.