DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa said the move comes in response to the need to reduce the development and production costs of new handsets for the Japanese mobile operator’s FOMA 3G service. DoCoMo considers the Symbian OS and Linux to offer the most open device platforms for smart phones.
DoCoMo will not specify which OS its partners should adopt. That decision will be left to individual manufacturers. But the company’s preferential stance leaves little room for rival mobile operating systems such as PalmSource’s Palm OS and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for Smartphones in its portfolio, at a crucial time in the development of the Japanese market for 3G smart phones.
Symbian has already gained useful experience of the Japanese 3G market through its relationships with Fujitsu Ltd, which has sold handsets based on the software through DoCoMo for the past year.
The relationship between DoCoMo and Symbian was further strengthened in September when the two companies announced their intention to create a standardized user interface and service-level platform based on Symbian OS for a new generation of FOMA handsets.
Meanwhile, Linux has emerged as a serious smart phone contender in several Asian countries, most notably China where interest in the software for both desktop and mobile applications has been gathering pace in recent months fueled by its open source origins and rapid development cycle.
DoCoMo apparently perceives similar benefits. However, it is unclear whether DoCoMo intends using an existing phone Linux, such as that developed by MontaVista Software, or if it is working on its own variant. The company’s urge for product differentiation and customization could suggest the latter.
Motorola was the first major cellphone vendor to stake a large part of its future smart phone strategy on Linux, when it announced its intention to break away from Symbian family in August to concentrate on products such as its recently released A760 for the Asia Pacific market.
Motorola’s lead was followed in October when ComputerWire revealed that South Korea’s Samsung would also be developing Linux-based handsets, possibly using software from local vendor Mizi Research.
Japanese electronics companies, many of which make phones for DoCoMo, are known to be actively pursuing the use of Linux for a wide range of products, including mobile phones. This was reinforced in July with the creation of the CE Linux Forum (CELF), made up of Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Sharp, Toshiba, and Matsushita (Panasonic), in addition to Samsung Electronics and Royal Philips Electronics.
DoCoMo’s favoritism towards Symbian and Linux closes a potential opening for Microsoft and PalmSource in the country, although neither Vodafone/J-Phone nor KDDI have yet made their own smart phone intentions clear.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
