OUTLOOK: Symbian/Nokia

DAVID POTTER, chairman of Psion, has already had to bury his pioneering business in palm-held computers, outgunned as he eventually was by rivals in the Far East and America. Now he's also having to say goodbye to Symbian, the attempt to produce an industry standard operating system for smart phones.

At least this time he's being paid to leave the kitchen, unlike with the palms, where he was forced to close at considerable cost to his bottom line. Nokia is paying up to pounds 135.7m in three installments for Psion's 31 per cent stake in Symbian. Yet the reaction of the share price - down 32 per cent yesterday - gives some measure of the disappointment.

Symbian was Psion's great hope for the future, a software miracle that its cheer leaders said would eventually come to control most of the world's new generation of mobile phones, rather in the way Microsoft Windows dominates the operating system market for PCs. Early indications were good.

The number of handsets using Symbian has been rising exponentially, albeit from a tiny base, and the system seems to be thrashing its main Microsoft rival where ever the two go head to head. Analysts were at one stage talking excitedly of an eventual IPO valued in the billions.

The emergence last year of Nokia, the big daddy of the mobile phones world, as the biggest shareholder alongside Psion was always bound to create problems. Symbian was intended as an open operating system available to all handset manufacturers. Whether Nokia plans to continue with that strategy or not, other mobile phone manufacturers were always bound to be suspicious of its greater involvement. MR Potter came to believe he had no option but to sell. Whatever Nokia's plans, its agenda has to be different from the independent one envisaged by Psion. One way or another, Symbian was destined to become Nokia's creature.

Mr Potter has no doubt done the right thing in deciding to channel his money into Teklogix instead, but there's no hiding the disappointment. Symbian was a made in Britain attempt to create a common industry standard in a cutting edge technology and it has failed.

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