Holbrow also feels that netbooks could be threatened by the continuing convergence of mobile phones. “What we’re seeing at the Symbian Foundation is a move towards superconvergence… all of your technologies all converging into one device,” he said. “We can see a world in two or three years’ time where mobile devices start to eat into the world of laptops and netbooks… obviously cameras are already doing it.”

Personally I find it hard to believe that something like a phone and netbook will converge at any point. If mobile phones got any bigger than they are, than they would lose their portability. And if you keep the mobile phone size where it is today, then that would only offer a compromised ‘netbook’ experience.

Symbian may be a strong possibility, given Nokia’s association with the platform. However, another possibility could be a version of its upcoming tablet OS, especially since touchscreen netbooks are expected to become more prevalent as the year progresses.

A leaked screenshot of Nokia’s upcoming Internet tablet operating system, codenamed Maemo Harmattan, has been revealed by MobileCrunch. The picture shows the Maemo Harmattan home screen, which is just one long scrollable page filled in with user widgets.

The interface has been designed for a widescreen display. If you look carefully at the picture, you will notice a blue background on the top third of the picture. This part is what will be visible on the screen at any particular time. Now this OS isn’t due any time soon, so don’t get your hopes up. Maemo is not expected until Q4 2010 at the earliest.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, was at the Nokia Developer Summit on Tuesday and gave his views on what a Symbian-based netbook should look like. It was his blog entry recently that brought to light the work Symbian engineers had done in porting the Symbian OS to Intel’s Atom CPU.

“I want the device to [have] a heartbeat,” meaning “always on,” [and] I want a device which doesn’t even require you to close its lid,” Williams said. He feels that netbooks should be similar to phones in terms of technology. If you close the lid on a netbook you lose your presence online, which doesn’t happen with a phone. In his view, a netbook should be ‘always online’, easy to use and have at least a few days worth of battery life.

There is no doubt that a possibility to port the Symbian OS to netbooks has created a big buzz. “There’s a lot of interest in netbooks,” said David Wood, a strategist for Symbian Foundation. “I’ve never been as busy and rushed off my feet in my entire life. We are seeing a lot of early experimentation.”

The Symbian Foundation is currently “in discussions with multiple parties,” according to Williams, who declined to elaborate. Check out the video below, where Lee Williams talks of his views on what a Symbian netbook should look like.

Via BusinessWeek.

I imagine Symbian has done this to highlight the flexibility of the Symbian platform beyond the use of smartphones into other devices. The Symbian team hopes to generate some interest in such a platform in the form of an investor. Whilst the screen shots show that it is very rough around the edges, the team were pleased with the “responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers”.

As Intel Atom (x86) processors are found in most netbooks I can understand why they chose the Intel platform. However, I think the more interesting combination would be to see this run on an ARM-based netbook, which would give it significantly greater battery life than that seen on an Atom-powered netbook. Indeed, this could be a combination that Nokia may be planning for its rumoured netbook entry.

However, I can understand that if Symbian has grand ambitions, then making its operating system available to any type of platform will be key to its success. At the end of the day, ODMs want choice and flexibility when designing new products and it looks like Symbian has taken the first step to give them just that.