Nokia is moving fast in the space of Smart Phones and their application development. Symbian is by far the most popular smart phone operating system but snapping at its heels are Apple and Google. Nokia acquired the Symbian Foundation last year. It has had a strategic tie up with Intel this year and now The Symbian Foundation has launched Symbian Horizon where developers can interact with Symbian for ideas on mobile app development and the rest of the related process of developing an app till it reaches the Smart Phone User.

Developing a mobile app for Symbian has never been easy and Symbian has been interacting with developers about their concerns. But it does not appear that a concrete decision has been taken to address the concerns of the developer community and if Symbian has decided on the platform for developing new mobile apps it has not yet revealed it to the developer community. Security concerns could be one reason. Although Symbian Horizon says that apps can be developed on any of the existing platforms they are especially looking for apps developed on the Symbian^1 platform.

As for the outlets for the apps Symbian reiterates that it is in discussion with some stores and has entered into strategic relationships with :

• Ovi Store by Nokia.
• Samsung Applications Store.
• AT&T Media Mall.

Symbian Horizon expects others to follow suit.

The business model that has been selected by Symbian seems to be the Book Publishing business model which means the apps developed will be treated as books and the commercial aspects will be similar to the publishing business.

Link

http://developer.symbian.org/

Google has delivered the knock out punch even before the first round began. The Google Chrome OS is free. It is open sourced and based on the Linux platform. This gives a shot in the arm to Linux and developers who were finding themselves marginalized by Microsoft and the commentators who were ever snapping at the Linux community for its non success vis a vis Microsoft.

Google has also announced a partial list of PC manufacturers it has decided to work with. The notable absence is of Dell and Sony. The partial list includes :

• Acer
• Adobe
• ASUS
• Freescale
• Hewlett Packard
• Lenovo
• Qualcomm
• Texas Instruments.

There is also good news for the developer community. The Google Chrome OS is likely to be ready and available by the end of this year. Google is also looking for full time developers to work on Google Chrome OS and interested developers can contact the following Google Offices :

• Mountain View, US
• San Francisco, US
• Kirkland, US
• Santa Monica, US
• Reston, US
• Montreal, CA
• Aarhus, DK
• London, UK
• St. Petersburg, RU
• Tokyo, JP