Samung steals headlines @ S60 Summit
Rating: To launch Symbian developers’ forum
Besides announcing a new handset – the L870, to coincide with the first day of the S60 Summit in Barcelona, Samsung announced that it was launching a Symbian developers’s forum in Q3 2008.
In fact, the company announced that it is taking pre-registrations for the forum via the net here. So there’s no need to wait.
It’s hard to gauge which is the biggest shock. The fact that a company like Samsung is suddenly reaching out to software developers or the strength of its support for Series S60.
Samsung conceded that 50 per cent of all of the smartphones it will launch in 2008 will be based on S60. It was also surprising to learn that Samsung accounted for 40 per cent of all S60 based new handsets in 2007.
Given the fact that LG is also a S60 licensee as well, it means that Nokia is far from dominant in S60, a perception which most of the industry let alone the public doesn’t share.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect to the developer forum announcement is not just that it will be making tools available but that it has a ‘go-to-market’ strategy.
This won’t just encompass joint marketing with the big software houses, it will include Samsung itself taking over the marketing of developer’s product itself but conceivable building the software into its own handsets.
The strange thing is that Samsung has effectively harnessed an event sponsored directly by Nokia to announce a rival service. That fits well with Nokia’s theme of the ‘openness’ of S60 but probably not the kind of openness it has envisaged.
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