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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?
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.
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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Well your group covers about 5% of the market, I guess they must be chasing the other 95% of the market.
geeks and fanbois make up an extreme minority and are generally not a market you want to specifically chase for mass market products, if your product appeals to them great, if not then you really haven't lost a lot, those without cash to burn are also without cash to make a profit from.
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.
Am I the only one that will really miss Symbian? I am no developer but I really liked my low-end S60 smartphones. UI may not be as fancy but when it comes to functionality and performance/price ratio these were the best phones I have ever head. System-wide copy-paste, BT file transfers, WLAN tethering, true multitasking and background processes, video calls.... it had it all for ages. On-board Python interpreter with a full API access is also extremely cool feature that I believe no modern OS can match. I also had StyleTap installed and so I could run almost all of my PalmOS programs, some of which are still much better than anything that is currently available for iOS or Android. All in all, I will miss it. When I will be finally forced to switch to Android, I think I'll miss more features than I will gain by a fancy UI.
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.
Most of their current customers don't give a damn about their phone's OS and have probably never heard the name Symbian. (Though I agree selling out to MS was a dumb move.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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
I always use the "wife" and "mom" factor to judge technology. Both wife and mom hate their Android phones. They can't figure out how to use them without much coaching. The iPhone has a good "wife" and "mom" usability factor as does the iPad. With very little coaching they were using these IOS based products within minutes. The Windows phone was also reasonable, but they felt it had too much glitz and much less intuitive then the iPhone. The Symbian phone was easier for "wife" and "mom" then the Android phone, but below the iPhone and the Windows Phone.
I am not an Apple fan, though I do use the iPhone as my primary phone.
Nokia is betting the Software capabilities and marketing strength of Microsoft to bootstrap them into the 21st century. Who knows, with a successful WIndows Phone Nokia might consider adding Android.
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.
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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.
Geeks and fanbois are a tiny fraction of the market. The N900, a geek-fest Linux-based phone, sold only 100,000 units. It hardly paid for itself.