Symbian backer ATT isn t ruling out Android support

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An ATT spokesperson today denied widely published reports that ATT plans to offer a single OS for smartphones. A founding member of the Symbian Foundation, ATT will also keep supporting Mac, Windows, BlackBerry, and perhaps Android.

In a rash of press and blog reports last week, remarks made by an ATT executive about ATT support for mobile OS were taken out of context, an ATT spokesperson told BetaNews today.

The spokesperson, Mark Siegel, told BetaNews that although ATT would like to experience less fragmentation in the smartphone OS market, the company is certainly not going to end support for devices such as RIM BlackBerry and Windows ME phones or the Mac OS-enabled iPhone.

After Roger Smith, ATT s director of next generation services and data product realization, delivered remarks at a Symbian Partner Event in San Francisco last week, a number of blogs and other publications reported that ATT plans to standardize on a single mobile OS over the next few years -- and also quoted Smith as saying that Symbian is a very credible and likely candidate to become that OS.

But some reporters present at the event apparently misunderstood Smith s comments, Siegel told BetaNews today.

Right now, mobile developers have to create different versions of the same application for different OS, and sometimes even different versions of the application for different versions of the same OS. So it takes that much longer to get the apps out there to our customers, the spokesperson conceded.

Could we see some consolidation here? Yes. But we are not going to have just one operating system for all of our devices, Siegel contended.

ATT holds great partnerships with companies such as RIM, Microsoft, and Apple, the spokesperson maintained. The US second-largest mobile carrier is also a founding member of the Nokia-spearheaded Symbian Foundation, a group that is now revamping the Symbian OS to bring together Symbian s three existing user interfaces -- UIQ, NTT DoCoMo s MOAP, and Nokia s own S60 -- into a new common, open source software framework .

Still, ATT isn t ruling out future support for either Android or LiMo, two open source mobile operating systems which compete with Symbian, Siegel said.

What we ve been saying all along is that if it makes sense for our customers, we will certainly offer an Android device. The same goes for LiMo. But no decision on this subject has been made, BetaNews was told.
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