Symbian dismisses Google

Symbian powers more than 165 million phones

Google's dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market, a senior executive at Symbian has said.

John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian, the platform that powers many of the world's phones, said Google lacked experience.

Google formed an alliance with 33 firms to develop an open platform for mobile phones, called Android.

Meanwhile, the head of Nokia in the UK said the firm was in discussions with Google about using the platform.

Simon Ainslie, Nokia UK's managing director, said: "We are always open to discuss and debate on that.

"We are having ongoing discussions with Google."

Mr Ainslie said the time was not right to make any announcement as to "how we can work with them".

He also said Nokia was very happy with its partnership with Symbian.

He said: "It's the world's most used platform. It's not a simple solution to make a platform work on a mobile."

"It's not search rocket science."

Symbian's recent financial results show it sold 20.4m smartphone software licenses in the last quarter of 2007 and since the company was launched nine years ago more than 165 million phones have been shipped using its platform.

Mr Forsyth said there was nothing to indicate that Google's dominance of the web would make it successful as a mobile phone platform provider.

"Search and a mobile phone platform are completely different things.

"It's costly, arduous and at times a deeply unsexy job of supporting customers day by day in launching phones. That's something there's very little experience of in Google's environment.
"if you are a serious phone maker and you are asked to bet your handsets on somebody, you would want to bet on someone with a track record of delivery and support."

Mr Forsyth also questioned whether developers would flock to the system.

"They are talking about having a phone by the end of next year. It's not one that is going to ignite developers."

Questions?

Why did Symbian reject Google?

What stopped Google from transferring their service to the mobile phones?

How many years has Symbian been running for?