Open source phones face competition from below

I didn't come away from the Smartphone show this week much wiser about the prospects for open source phones. Android is looming and Symbian is soon-to-be-open. But I did gather one thing: the main competition is dumb-phones.

Symbian is going to be open source, the company's research chief David Wood told me again at the show. But It can't happen immediately. In fact, even the first incremental step can't happen till Nokia's purchase of Sybmain goes through and the Symbian Foundation is set up - sometime round the middle of next year. At that stage, a small amount of the code will go open source, and the rest of it is available under a flat fee to Foundation members.

There's going to be a complex procedure in turning code over to the open source community - so the amount of open source code will ramp up gradually over the following few years. This bit is going to be complicated - if you don't believe me, read my colleague David Meyere's interv iew with Wood.

But the big picture is that Symbian will be vastly cheaper to handset makers and OEMs. It goes from today's licence fee per handset, to next year's Foundation membership fee - and eventually, when it's all open sourced, to nothing.

That's more or less what Symbian has always promised - the company wants to get the OS on bog-standard feature phones (somewhat of an uphill struggle so far) and the only way to do that is to make it dead cheap.

Meanwhile, Android is starting out as an open source platform, so handset makers have yet another avenue for cheap devices. It's just a matter of which OS the vendors choose. Or is it?

Not necessarily, according to Charlotta Falvin, CEO of The Astonishing Tribe - a user interface specialist with software in millions of phones: "The costs of switching platform are huge," she said. "If people hesitatie to make investments, they may stay on existing platforms."

In other words, as the recession bites, operators and handset makers selling to the low end of the market will stick with existing closed "featurephone" platforms, and not move to the open platforms typical of smartphones.

Instead of putting money into a platofmr change, they will just pimp their existing platforms, apparently, and try to make them look new.. That's something Falvin is very happy with - it's the stock-in-trade of her Tribe.

"Last year, operators wanted an iPhone-killer," she said. "This year, they want to make phones look more expensive."

The whole thing means more fragmentation, not less, she said, and it sounds a plausible view to me.