reading skype journal today, i was interested by jim courtney's piece about why skype needs a symbian client, and it really made me focus on symbian and how everyone seems to be talking about it now.

there's no shortage of flashy hybrid phone/pda devices about now, with windows mobile, blackberry, treo etc., but the one name that keeps coming up is symbian. i was recently at 3gsm in barcelona, where i came across a few different innovative companies doing things with voip and mobile. all seemed to have a "supported devices" list that read nokia nxx, nokia exx, nokia 66xx ... all symbian devices.

symbian has been around for ever, but it does seem to be emerging right now as a realistic and powerful platform for voip and im apps, in the way that all the windows and java-based stuff has failed to do. perhaps this is an important technology inflection, and we'll look back to this as an obvious historical fork point, like with pcs and the death of dos,os/2 and the mass market adoption of windows?