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Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian by [David Wood]

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David Wood

Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian Kindle Edition

by David Wood (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Over the last two decades, smartphones have ascended to a position of enormous global impact. These multi-purpose near-miracle devices place into the hands of users worldwide astonishing quantities of real-time information. They have become major sources of entertainment, utility, and control. Indeed, every year, smartphones become ever more capable. As such, they’re profoundly transforming human experience in every walk of life.

But where are these steps of smartphone progress taking us? What are the core factors that have propelled all these improvements? And can we re-use some of that underlying improvement engine for potentially even more significant purposes?

In short, these are questions of the smartphone future, the smartphone past, and the wider present. These questions deserve good answers.

These questions have inspired the author to set down in writing his own experiences and reflections from two helter-skelter decades close to the heart of this remarkable industry. Throughout that time period, he has been an avid enthusiast for the potential of smartphones, an active participant in many key projects, a futurist and forecaster of what might happen next, and, at the same time, a persistent critic of much of what he saw. He observed at close quarters the maelstrom of the industry, with its rich mix of stunning successes and devastating failures. He lived through a great deal which deserves to be better known.

This book shares particular insight from the inside story of the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian. Symbian is the comparatively little-known company that, behind the scenes, laid vital foundations for the present-day near-ubiquity of smartphones. Despite its subsequent untimely demise, Symbian has rich connections with the future, the past, and the wider present of smartphones.

The author tells the Symbian story from his unique vantage point as the only person to remain on the company’s senior leadership team throughout almost the entirety of its turbulent, roller-coaster existence: from its 1998 formation as an uneasy joint venture based around “the big three” giants of the mobile phone industry of that era – Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia – right through to its collapse, a dozen years later, under pressure from faster, nimbler, more inspired competitors from Silicon Valley.

Nowadays few people remember much about Symbian – if they ever knew about it in the first place. It was a company that mainly lived in the shadows, away from public glare. But despite its low public profile, Symbian was the indisputable global leader in the smartphone market for most of the first decade of the 21st century. During that time, software developed by Symbian powered the vast majority of the world’s smartphones, as the smartphone market itself grew and grew in scale. Sales of Symbian-powered smartphones went from millions of units being sold in a year, through millions of units being sold in a month, to millions of units being sold each week.

For much of that time, Symbian appeared to have the potential to be “the Microsoft of mobile computing”, with potential revenues and publicity to match. Symbian’s customers included the world’s top five mobile phone manufacturers, and many other regional leaders.

But sales eventually peaked, in 2010, and fell into steep decline shortly afterwards. Ask people today about smartphones and the words they’ll mention are “iPhone”, “Android” – and (perhaps) “Windows Phone” or “RIM BlackBerry”. The word “Symbian” is a fast-receding memory.

It need not have turned out this way. With different choices and different actions, Symbian could have fulfilled its vision of being “the most widely used and most widely liked software platform in the world”. As the book shows, that vision was credible as well as ambitious.

En route, the Symbian story, “warts and all”, suggests many practical lessons for how to guide the future evolution of other forms of smart technology.

Length: 1340 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Language: English

Product details

ASIN : B00NAZTCTW
Language: : English
File size : 1672 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 1340 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 1,361,686 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 454 in Radio & Wireless Engineering
- 5,537 in Business Management (Kindle Store)
- 12,103 in Business Management (Books)

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timlondon02

David Wood's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 October 2018

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Mr Wood's history of Symbian is an accurate, first hand documentary of the challenges faced by any organisation charged with defining a new standard technology platform and/or reconciling the conflicting needs of competing stakeholders. Unfortunately discretion and a kind heart prevents him from nailing down the most direct reasons for Symbian's failure - the politicking of executives in Symbian and Nokia more concerned about their own career progression than the greater good, including at least one with a severe alcoholism problem, and a failure of each generation of the company's management to listen to their own staff, who were telling them in 2001 and 2002 of the importance of an App store, of third party apps developers and good tooling - something management didn't wake up to until 2007 by which time it was too late. Would have benefitted also from telling the story in chronological order, not jumping around in the timeline.

John Pagonis

Required reading for technologists, business and human resources professionals in tech industries

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 September 2014

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This book tells the story of what really happened at Symbian from the eyes, ears and heart of the person most entuned with the passions and culture which created and destroyed the smartphone primordial soup that enabled the magical gadgets of today.

David Wood in this book presents a fact-based documentary which should be studied by technologists, business and human resources professionals who want to create, build, improve and innovate multi-billion dollar tech industries. David Wood is a pioneer not only because he developed much of the early smartphone technology and business, but because he makes sure histrory in not written only by the victor

4 people found this helpful

A C

A great summary of the PSION and SYMBIAN era

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 June 2017

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A great summary of the PSION and SYMBIAN era. An excellent book for anyone interested how NOKIA blew it up and became a non-entity by delaying the switch to Android.

Gatchers

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2014

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Fantastic book, required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of smartphone operating systems and platforms.

Jonathan P.

Fascinating insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 October 2014

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Fascinating insight into what went on behind the scenes of Psion and Symbian. Really enjoying this read

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Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian Kindle Edition

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