Six Japanese companies came together to develop their own mobile operating system that is compatible with Android and Symbian. NTT Docomo, Renesas, Electronics, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic and Sharp are therefore to create a consortium to market the first smartphone using their OS in late 2011 or early 2012. They will focus primarily on multimedia features and 3D graphics. According to the companies, this decision was born of a desire by the Japanese handset manufacturers to develop an OS nippon to maintain a national ecosystem.

We think that this is primarily a desire to fight against the iPhone, which represented 46.1% of smartphone market in Japan in 2009. By joining forces, companies reduce development costs and time required for writing such a system.

One might ask if this is necessary. In trying to sell an OS that stand out for Android, Symbian, Meego and other Japanese companies dilute even more deals in place in favor of Apple, which has only a single platform with an exceptional number of applications. However, there will be more and less OS developers have access to a single system for developing programs that rival the apple. You may be speaking of compatibility mode, but the differences do not help hardware and software engineers.