What's the worst mobile phone operating system (OS)? Which one has mobile phone companies deserting in droves? The answer is Symbian - primarily used by Nokia. Whilst most consumers have gravitated to Android, Apple and Blackberry, Nokia has been losing sales because of its outdated Symbian OS (phones like the flagship N97 and N86 were riddled with bugs and the company suffered real damage to its reputation).
Unsurprisingly both Samsung and Sony-Ericsson have announced they will no longer use Symbian, preferring Android/Windows or their own OS.
So guess which mobile phone operating system the EU has decided to give €22 million to in the form of an EU grant? The answer is of course Symbian.
According to Mobile News:
"The EU project will become known as SYMBEOSE, meaning ‘Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe’. Under the terms of the agreement with the EC, the Artemis initiative will match the investment made by the consortium, providing the other half of the required funding in order to meet the full cost of the SYMBEOSE development project".
The fact that the EU seeks to use €22 million hard-pressed taxpayers money to subsidise a mobile operating system is bad enough. What makes it even worse is that it has chosen to subsidise the De Lorean of systems.
How can it be right for the EU to waste our money in this way - and choose to give a taxpayer subsidy to promote one mobile phone system over another. Surely this is an anti-competitive measure against other mobile phone companies?
Now, you may read the above as something just for geeks to consider. But it is much more than that. The EU's huge grant to Symbian, is yet another example of how the organisation is choosing losers and frittering away taxpayers' money on a grand scale.
