Confidence in Symbian
With the recent launch of the PalmOS based Treo 600 which is getting rave reviews here in the U.S. and the fact that Microsoft is closing in on launching Windows phones that don't suck you can start to get a little worried for little old Symbian. I had this conversation just the other day with one of the people I work with. There's lots of questions right now about who will be the dominant player in the smart phone market.
However, with the launch of the new Sendo X it looks like there's still some really cool Symbian phones on the horizon and that worrying now might be a bit premature. We've known for a while that the Symbian phones that are out there are the proverbial tip of the iceberg, but to see Sendo knock it out of the park with this phone is pretty inspiring. 64k Colors? 32MB RAM? SD card support? Full-on stereo sound? Video with Flash? That's all fantastic stuff. The phone's a bit hefty at 120g, but that's still 10g lighter than my 3650 and only 10g heavier than the upcoming Nokia 6600, so it's definitely competitive. I have not been, ahem, kind to Sendo. I really disliked their deal with Microsoft, but it's nice to see them bounce back like this and within a relatively short time launch this phone which addresses the majority of complaints about Series 60 phones. It really is great.
SonyEricsson as well is inspiring confidence with the launch of the lustworthy P900. And the other day they reiterated their commitment to the Symbian platform after PalmOne's CEO insinuated that they were in talks with the company for a Palm phone. The P800 has sold over a million units - which is an incredible success if you think about how expensive that phone is and how targeted their market.
Really, really cool to see these phones launched. Now we need to see more 3G phones from Symbian. These phones are great, but are really just meeting the needs of today's market. Symbian will really inspire confidence once we see that theirs is the platform of choice for next generation phones as well. These phones may be in the pipeline - there's many, many Symbian phones left to be launched in the next year. But for now, these phones above definitely give me the warm-fuzzies that Symbian is still on the up-curve, which is definitely nice.
Believe it or not, news like this can brighten my day... ;-) I may need to get a life.
-Russ