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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."
...is coming in 2012!
Why Nokia? Why? Do the management like Microsoft money more than they like staying in business?
Seriously, I dug out my old N95 to let a friend use it for the navi. Going through the one, it is astonishing just how bad the UI really it. It is such an unintuitive OS. Why they were so slow to jump into a modern OS is beyond me. Though..I would not have gone for MS Phone. That can only end in tears.
why pay for a os when you could get one for free from google. Also what about the basic phone market? Not everyone wants a smartphone.
Soon they will start saying "Symbian (or MeeGo) is the future" things all over again. They're tough.
I'm not convinced at all that Nokia have worked out how to deal with the midrange. Yeah, we all know that WP7 is going to be the OS for high-end smartphones, and Nokia are "looking to the next billion sales" for cheaper stuff. However, the message for everything else has been confusing and inconsistent.
Here's one way of looking at it - Nokia: Mind the Gap.
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Symbian currently has around a third of the smartphone market - second only to Android. About double what iPhone has. Three times as much as Blackberry. It's a lot. Yes, it's going to fade. But putting ALL their eggs into Windows Phone 7 is insane. There's no way the total Windows smartphone share (nevermind Nokia's individual share) is going to get anywhere close to where they are in the space of a year. It's highly unlikely it can even catch up with Blackberry let alone iPhone let alone Android.
They'e going to lose all their customers. This is a suicide move.
It looks like Nokia is ruling itself out of a number of markets including, geeks, fanbois, those without cash to burn and those who know about phones.
Which other groups have I missed?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
If you want my Symbian phone, Nokia, you'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
No. They will wait until it breaks and refuse to sell you a replacement.
Symbian?
Seems like there's finally a good use for that "and nothing of value was lost" line!
As a long time Nokia buyer I'm sad to see, that its time to look for greener pastures. I currently own a Symbian smartphone... It sucks next to all the shiny androids and iphones and is barely better than my first smartphone, the windows mobile ipaq PDA(not buying windows again no matter how much the windows phone 7 has evolved). However, I have hard time imagining my parents ever learning to use a different device/system on their old school call only phones...
Well, I was about to get an N8 in the next few days- it was a choice between the N8 and Desire HD, but the N8 did it for me due to the camera and battery life. Would it be wise to avoid this now?
If you get a new phone every year then I don't think it will make much difference. If you keep them until they fall apart then expect a lack of apps and support towards the end.
My 10 year old 3310 still works perfectly, even now in the hands of a pre-teen, so I don't know if that will work.
For the price, Nokia phones are surprisingly robust. I've rarely seen one fail (except for the battery, but you can get a unofficial replacement very cheaply).
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How long do you usually keep a phone? If you are someone who churns through them, even high-end smartphone models, at one every 12 or 18 months then this makes no difference: the apps that exist will still exist and there will be phones out there so people developing for them (or at least maintaining existing apps) for at least that long. If you are looking at the phone with a view to it lasting three years or more then this announcement will have greater potential to be an issue for you.
For me, the tragic thing is I really like Nokia hardware buttons. Granted, the whole phone arena was moving away from a whole lot of buttons, but I liked the way they at least had:
-pick up (green phone icon)
-hang up (red phone icon)
-menu key (in the center)
plus maybe a camera/shutter key on the side.
Even Nokia S40 phones used to have the ability to either silence the ring (keeps ringing), or hit the red phone button, and it might tell the caller "dialled phone is busy", depending on the network.
The iPhone doesn't do that.
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If you need a good camera, why not buy a Nexus S or one of the new Sony Ericssons instead? HTC's cameras are fairly poor.
I'd say the N8 is a pretty safe buy anyway, as the Desire HD (along with the rest of today's smartphones) will be pretty much obsolete by 2013 as well.
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.
I am personally waiting for MeeGo phone which I hope will be released, and if it will be at least as good as N900 I am voting with my wallet for it, just to show that there is someone who needs it. Also Nokia's decision to create MeeGo developer edition for N900 ups my spirit as well.
HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the damned thing through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
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Gee, it's very nice that Symbian sold more than iOS or Android. If it wasn't making Nokia any money, or if Nokia couldn't eke out much of a profit on the phones that had it, the fact that they sold tons of phones with it loaded is not really relevant. We don't call Microsoft a titan of the PC Games industry because every computer comes with the hugely popular Solitaire and Minesweeper, and Nokia doesn't consider Symbian a success just because a lot of phones happen to have it loaded.
You think you can switch from developing on Symbian -> Windows Phone at the drop of a hat? Or from Windows Phone -> Android?
It all takes time. Time which Android is using to become the defacto, open standard.
2011 is basically going to be the year of Android *everywhere*, and after that... Frankly, too late, The Network Effect is in place.
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Let's face it, it doesn't matter one blind bit for Fred End User which platform the phone runs. What matters is what can be done with it.
Apple made exceptionally good use of its understanding of design to create a phone that was easy to use in many aspects (but not all). RIM understood early on that business people need calendar, email and contacts on the go and focused on that, Google is betting on people still not understanding how they pay for "free" with their privacy to push their own platform Android (cleverly using the "open" cvoncept to drag the technical people along). Nokia has, well, a toolkit but no focus, no killer app.
Personally, I see the move towards Microsoft as beyond exceptionally bad - Nokia has sold its soul to a partner who is only interested in using it. Instead, Nokia should first develop a focus, and then gather the tools to do it. This could still be Symbian - if that really went Open Source and an effort was made to make it provably secure it could still support a recovery, provided some people start to think outside the box AND ARE ALLOWED TO PROGRESS (I know what management saturation looks like - it means you have a lot of high earners who spend their day playing politics, whereas the creative people get so bored they walk, making the company even more boring and prone to die).
But hey, if they want to commit commercial suicide by crawling in bed with MS, so be it. It's a shame - I liked Nokia.
Insert
Probably because no one is even close to the level of quality of N8's camera?
It's essentially like saying "well sure, that bugatti is nice for speed, but so is my sporty looking audi, which is a lot better then toyota!" /car analogy
3210, 12 years old, currently my secondary phone. Going on its 5th (if remember correctly) battery. No other problems with the phone.
I do hope that nokia doesn't die. The asian crap motherboards and soldering work present in most modern phones (korean, chinese, japanese designed china made, california designed china made, etc) is just shit and won't live through 3 years in most cases. Nokia? Drag it through hell and it will still work a decade later.
Me and my classmates used to play catch with a 3310. The thing often fell on a hard concrete floor from about 7 ft off the ground as a result. Surprisingly, it would still turn on, and even more surprisingly, still work, every time we put the casing back together.
It had a few scratches here and there, but for all 6 years I had it (2nd hand by the way) the phone worked like a dream. The only reason I don't have it right now, is because someone nicked it from my pocket along with my wallet some concert.
It still doesn't mean that the latest generation Nokia phones are as hardy as the black-and-white stuff though, maybe the recent ones already have some planned obsolescence built-in...
Let's face it, it doesn't matter one blind bit for Fred End User which platform the phone runs. What matters is what can be done with it.
Yes, and so far nobody has ever been able to make a phone with WinCE on it stable, and nobody has been able to make a Symbian platform sing and dance even as well as WinCE, let alone iOS or Android. OTOH, nobody has been able to make a low-memory phone work as well as Nokia. I'm not one who is in love with their UI but the phones seem much less flaky than Motorola phones like the RAZR or other BREW phones.
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"Hello, tech support? I've had my Windows Nokia for 6 months and it's really really slow" "When was the last time you defragged your phone?" "What?" "Oh - looks like your phone is riddled with viruses and malware... We will have to format your phone and reinstall Windows... Do you have your original install disk? " Kill me now.
Nokia should just get out of the "smart" phones altogether and focus on what they've always done best - cheap, sturdy, basic phones that can make calls and send text messages and have weeks of battery life.No need to find special chargers when I go to a country with strange power outlets for a week. If I drop it in a lake, I'll get a new one for 20€. I know that I'm probably in the minority, but that's the sort of phone that I want, and I'm sure that there are enough of us to sustain Nokia if they stop wasting money on developing these expensive almost-a-real-computer devices.
Although untrue, the OP explicitly said he considered the Desire HD, whose camera is very poor compared to anything by Sony Ericsson. Then again, he was also concerned about obsolescence, so SE might be a bad choice, considering their poor software upgrade record and locked-down bootloader. The Nexus S is easily upgradeable and has a fairly decent if unspectacular camera, so it might be a better compromise.
You can take your silly Bugatti comparison and stick it; the N8 is still only a camera phone, miles away from any professional digital cam.
I just bought a Nokia 1800. Not a smartphone, but I don't need one; I have a computer for all that stuff. Battery life: currently around 2.5 weeks with moderate text/call usage. Very simple, does all the basic stuff excellently though. Cost me £16 with £10 credit, so basically £6 for the phone.
This has a very similar interface to older Nokia phones I've used. I'm basically a happy Nokia customer. Am I at all interested in Windows Phone 7? No, and never will be. I was interested in the potential of the N900, but was far too expensive to justify actually buying. Shame we probably won't see what it's successors could offer.
I'm kind of sad the 1800 is likely the last Nokia product I'll buy, since prior to Elop it looked like they had a superb long-term strategy--they just needed a little longer to get it all together in the short-medium term, and they would have continued to be the best.
(Sheesh, Slashdot can't even handle a simple UTF-8 £ sign without mangling it.)
They seemed to jump over the Embrace phase though, and go directly to Extermination.
We don't even have consumer statistics on Nokia's WP7 products and they already announced the extinguishment of Symbian. Yes, sounds like the beginning of a zombie Nokia to me..
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I used an 8210 (slightly older than a 3310 but much higher end when it came out and IMO the nicest phone I have ever used) for years and when it finally died I bought more secondhand, the problem is I found they were becoming unreliable, the phones would sometimes cut out when trying to connect a call especially in low signal areas. I suspected a power problem but didn't have any way to track things down further. IIRC I tried a new battery and that didn't make any difference.
It got replaced with a modern low end nokia and yeah the games are a little better, it's a little lighter, it has some data functionality (though i've never used it) and it has a large color screen and a camera. However as a basic phone it sucks compared to the 8210, there is little to no gap between the front cover and the screen so it's much easier to smash the screen (mine is on it's third screen) and the color screens are vritually unreadable with the backlight off. With the black andwhite LCD of the old phones there was really no need for the backlight at all and I generally turned it off in the settings.
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Going by the majority of comments here, let me be the devil's advocate.
In my opinion, what Nokia is trying to do is avoid commoditization of mobile hardware. Symbian was no good for them in terms of features and performance requirements.
Going with Android will effectively make the phone hardware a commodity (like what happened with PCs). Just imagine, with Android becoming ubiquitous everywhere, how long until users are free to choose any mobile phone and transfer their full preferences and data to another Android phone. In that case, competition in mobile hardware industry will remain on the basis of price only.
What I feel is, Nokia is betting on WP7 to stand out from the rest of the pack (Samsung/LG/HTC) in order to maintain their market share.
Will this gamble pay off, only time will tell.
This is just like the thinning-out of available personal computer operating systems. We as consumers are getting less of a choice. Our data and devices are going to be managed by a smaller set of companies.
I like my Symbian phone. I like putting music on it without having to go through Apple, Microsoft, or Google. I just send over my own LAME-encoded MP3s through USB, Bluetooth, or SD-card, and manage my own files. I can do multiple things on the phone at once, and even browse and have control over the phone's whole file system. Microsoft, Apple, and Google don't know what I'm doing on my phone, and can't exert control over my rights. It was comforting knowing that even if Nokia could, they were so ineffectual as a company that they would blunder every opportunity to.
Yes, Symbian is old, difficult, and beyond hope of competing. But it was one more choice that now we won't have.
There are a lot of Europeans that would buy a Nokia just because it is Nokia and not because it runs whatever crap they put on it.
That's probably sort of true but I imagine European cell phone users are a bit more discerning than that...
However I kind of expect WP7 to damage that respectable image that Nokia has on European consumers.
Actually I don't think so - WP7 is a pretty good reboot, it's not like they just re-skinned the old Windows Mobile. I think if people bought phones with it just because they were Nokia, they would not really be that unhappy with a WP7 phone. So I don't think this will hurt Nokia unless for some reason they ceased being good at designing hardware (which seems unlikely).
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Which is why I didn't compare it to a jet?
No, instead you chose to compare it to a Bugatti because you're an utter wanker. Fact of the matter is that the N8's camera is only slightly better than the ones found in similarly expensive phones from Sony Ericsson, whereas the cars you chose for your blatantly false analogy are in completely different categories.
Have you actually seen the camera in N8, or are you just trolling? It's leaps and bounds beyond any other present in a mobile phone at the moment and mostly comparable to pocket cameras. None of the other phone cameras are in the same category at the present time.