Daniel Robinson

Do mobile applications matter to your business? If so, which platform do you choose to mobilise access to your corporate data? These questions have been vexing companies for years while the lack of a single standard platform has been blamed for holding back many deployments.

A few years ago, there was a widely held view that Symbian was bound to triumph. Its platform was designed from the ground up to be a mobile operating system, having its roots in the successful Psion handhelds of the 1990s. Besides, it had the backing of all the major handset makers, such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

Today, however, there is a growing perception in the IT industry that Symbian OS is for consumer handsets, and that Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry are a more natural choice for businesses, and Symbian seems unable to counteract this.

This impression is reinforced by events such as the recent roundtable I attended, where Symbian executives demonstrated various available applications, almost all of which were aimed at consumers. A notable exception was an application that lets the user snap a business card with their phone’s camera, then upload the image to an online service that extracts the contact information through optical character recognition, and adds it to a database for access later.

While impressive and useful, this software is hardly a “killer app” that is going to swing the deal for an IT department uncertain whether Symbian or Windows Mobile handsets will prove a better bet. On the other side of the coin, Windows Mobile comes with built-in support for push email delivered from an Exchange server, and if you need to code your own mobile applications, you can use the same tools used for desktop Windows development.

There is another reason why businesses are leaning towards Windows Mobile. Most enterprise software products come out of the US, and developers there tend not to see Symbian as a priority when looking to mobilise access to their applications. I’ve even spoken to firms that said they were planning to ship a Palm OS version of their product before they would consider porting to Symbian.

Of course, it’s possible that Symbian isn’t too bothered by this situation. After all, Nokia alone now accounts for about 40 percent of all phones sold globally, and almost all of these are Symbian-based consumer handsets. However, unless the company wants to find itself edged out of the corporate market, it needs to do more to convince enterprise developers in the US to take it more seriously.