Nokia remains 'open' to Android amid Symbian renaissance

At yesterday's N97 launch my colleague Ross Catanzariti (Good Gear Guide journalist) and I cornered Nokia Australia and New Zealand general manager Emile Baak to ask about operating systems, you know, the important questions.

First, a little context.

The latest generation of Nokia's flagship Nseries handset range, the N97, is upon us and is the first Symbian S60-based phone to ship with widgets promoted to being the primary mode of data access. And so it should, widgets are perfect for this.

Nokia also owns Qt Software, whose namesake toolkit Qt is used to develop KDE's Plasma, one of the leading widget development environments on Linux. It runs on Windows and Mac OS X too.

Qt has also now been ported to S60 – see this link for a technical preview.

Hey, even the Maemo operating system for Nokia Internet devices supports widgets or “simple access” applications for networked data.

So there you have it, as it turns out Nokia is no stranger to widgets despite dragging its feet behind the iPhone and Android in bringing the wonderful world of widget applications to the mobile phone.

Back to Nokia and mobile operating systems.

We asked Baak whether Nokia would consider using another operating system on a device like the N97 given the interest in the iPhone and Android.

Short of saying Nokia would take Android under its wing, Baak said Nokia is open to any open system. If it's “open” we'll consider it, according to Nokia.

That's definitely the right strategy to have, but only time will tell if Nokia is prepared to act on that. Nokia has invested billions in mobile software development and may be too proud to accept an alternative due to Not Invented Here syndrome.

Sun has also invested billions in Solaris and could have offered a Linux alternative way back when. Instead it chose to open source Solaris, much the same way Nokia has open sourced Symbian instead of putting its weight behind mobile Linux.

In case you're wondering, no, I'm not trying to be an operating system or software strategist for Nokia (although it could use a good one), I'm trying to figure out why companies can have such good, marketing leading strategies only to see them brushed aside by startups – and non-mobile phone company startup products in this case.

Why does it take a company like Apple or Google to do what Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, et al, should have and could have done five years ago? As a consumer that's what baffles me.

One possible explanation is too much product diversity. As mentioned, not only does Nokia have many software development practices, it has a myriad of different devices that essentially do the same thing, but consume a lot of engineering resources.

Apple has the iPhone. Google has Android. Nokia has everything else mobile.

Widgets and the Ovi Store will no doubt see S60 increase its relevance, but when there are free options out there why not at lease test the water?

There's now reason why Nokia should not release an Android device and see how it goes.

As it happens, rumours surfaced this week about Nokia offering an Android netbook.

Hey, that's exactly what Nokia needs – another product line.

I won't be cynical, I think an Android netbook from Nokia would be very interesting indeed. Go openness!