Mobile OS war; Nokia's symbian losing 2 major supporters

In past few days, 2 major phone manufacturers, i.e. SonyEricsson (Sept 24th) and Samsung (Oct 1st); have announced that they will not longer support Symbian.

Per se it's not so surprising since SE is really struggling and Samsung has developped its Bada; and both are fully supporting Android!

But it's a serious drawback to Nokia who bought all remaining shares of Symbian in 2008 for €264 million; and looking at the competition coming, even opened the sources of Symbian back in February; hoping for more OEM and developers to use it.

While all the other manufacturers are leveraging the shared experience of Android and also developing their own OS for some markets; this leaves Nokia pertty much alone here. Can Symbian compete against Android in terms of speed of innovation and implementation; for the mass market? The worlds "speed" and "mass market" are critical here; especially since Android phones are starting to compete against Nokia's stronghold: the cheap phones in developing countries.

About the MeeGo, which is the continuation of the Maemo (remember the N900, one of Nokia's biggest failures); are consumers going to wait for it for long (nothing about this at recent Nokia World 2010)? Time is, as always, a critical factor.

But what is truly behind the OS war?

- Ability to innovate and bring those innovations to market, fast.

- Ability to attract developers; as we know that content is a key element of the smartphone business.

Something to follow very close!