Nokia

Introducing Nokia's Software Platform

One of the world's largest providers of smartphones, Nokia is at the heart of a global ecosystem of devices, services, and applications. With this success comes diversity. A handset that sells successfully in the United States or Europe may be too expensive to sell in developing markets, and a phone inexpensive enough in developing markets may seem primitive by the standards in Europe or the United States. This diversity can lead to fragmentation; fortunately, Nokia is well aware of this and responds to the threat of fragmentation with software development platforms that span product lines.

In this chapter, we take a brief look at Nokia's hardware and software platforms. Once you understand the platforms that Nokia offers, we discuss application distribution options when targeting Nokia products. After reading this chapter, you should be able to select the appropriate Nokia platform for your application and understand how you will deliver your application to others.

Introducing Nokia's Hardware Platforms

To deliver compelling products to such a wide range of markets, Nokia must produce devices at a wide range of prices that reflect manufacturing and software development costs. With device costs tightly coupled to component costs, the key to producing inexpensive devices is to manage expenses on components. This in turn affects the software the product is able to run. To support this, Nokia divides its software portfolio into three software platforms: Series 40, Symbian, and MeeGo.

Symbian

Symbian has a long history in the mobile marketplace, having originally been built as an integration of software contributed by Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson, and Symbian Ltd in 1998. Ten years to the day of Symbian Ltd's inception, Nokia announced its intent to acquire all Symbian Ltd shares and create the Symbian Foundation. Today, the nonprofit Symbian Foundation oversees the development and growth of the open source Symbian platform, working with contributions from companies and individuals around the world.

Nokia remains one of the major contributors to the Symbian source code base, even as Symbian remains the platform of choice for smartphones built by members of the Symbian Foundation and others. As component costs have dropped and contributors continue to optimize the software, Symbian is now able to run on lower-cost devices. This enables Nokia and others to produce an increasing number of Symbian devices for cost-conscious markets, as well as for more demanding users.