Nokia - No More Symbian Phones After 2012

mikejuk writes "After the decision to go with Windows Phone 7 it has been obvious that the fate of the Symbian Phone — the phone that sold more than iPhone or Android — wasn't good. However where there is life there is hope and some developers and users clung to the hope that there might be more Symbian phones in the future. Perhaps they could coexist with Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices. Now, in a open letter to developers Nokia have made it clear that they will create no more Symbian phones after 2012 and they will just wait for the old phones to fade way while trying to sell Windows Phones to the existing users."

Comments

Story misleading and sensationalist

[ccr]

TFA and the original source (press release from Forum Nokia, http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/03/25/open-letter-to-developer-community ) reveal that:

Over the past weeks we have been evaluating our Symbian roadmap and now feel confident we will have a strong portfolio of new products during our transition period - i.e. 2011 and 2012.

And further ..

Iâ(TM)ve been asked many times how long we will support Symbian and Iâ(TM)m sure for many of you it feels we have been avoiding the question. The truth is, it is very difficult to provide a single answer. We hope to bring devices based on Windows Phone to market as quickly as possible, but Windows Phone will not have all language and all localization capabilities from day one. [...] That is why we cannot give you the date when Symbian will no longer be supported.

Finally it is stated:

What I can promise you is that we will not just abandon Symbian users or developers. As a very minimum, we have a legal obligation, varying in length between countries, to support users for a period of time after the last product has been sold.

So there's nothing saying that Nokia will suddenly stop supporting Symbian in 2012. It'll just fade out gradually, and even they don't admit knowing when it will fade out completely.

Re:Old news, but thank God!

[TheRaven64]

Am I the only one that will really miss Symbian?

Nope. The UI needed an update, as did some of the developer APIs designed for really low memory environments, but the kernel (EXA2 especially) is a really beautiful design. A simple but powerful capabilities model and power management designed into the driver model from the ground up. A realtime nanokernel that could run multiple OS personalities, so you could have the hard realtime OS for the radio and the main Symbian OS microkernel running on the same core. Device driver separation, with the privileged-mode component just handling exposing the device to userspace, and a (typically, much bigger) userspace component handling allowing different apps to use it. Pervasive multithreading from the nanokernel up, so it would scale nicely to n-core machines.