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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!
I agree that MS is a losing proposition, but symbian will also quickly bring the company to an end. It is a truly terrible OS compared to a modern streamlined OS like iOS of Android.
It is a gamble, but not as much as a gamble as sticking with symbian, symbian has been dead for a while, it remains to be seen whether they jumped from the titanic to an equally doomed ship though, only time will tell. Remember even if the gamble fails they can always join the Android bandwagon, phones are rapidly replaced, if they got enough from MS for this it could well be a relatively risk free venture and you can be pretty sure regardless of what the marketing are pushing there will be backup plans and work going on in the backrooms.
I agree that MS is a losing proposition, but symbian will also quickly bring the company to an end. It is a truly terrible OS compared to a modern streamlined OS like iOS of Android.
Yes. On the other hand, I find Maemo to be better than both iOS and Android. I think the problem was that Nokia lost focus when they decided to start with MeeGo. It would have been wiser to maintain focus on Maemo for another year or two while treating MeeGo as more of a background project.
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.
It wasn't about Symbian. It was about Qt, an target which would have allowed developers to program for current and future devices (and desktops).
They were trying like crazy to get people to develop for them, what with the $10 million prize and all.
Here's a recent little plea from Nokia to developers:
Then:
Yeah, right.
If I were developer, I think I'd target Android because of the numbers, and Linux-based WebOS, because it seems cool. (Inputting the Konami code to enter dev mode? Highly geeky.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
Well, I don't know if Nokia will walk away from the market, but the market certainly might.
Before: (Nokia to the market) Buy our somewhat-cheap Symbian phones. You can buy Qt apps, and they'll continue to work on Meego when we (finally) release it.
Now: (Nokia to market) Buy our somewhat-cheap Symbian phones. You can buy Qt apps, and they won't work on our new, high-end phone line. And we'll make vague statements about Meego, while burying it in a few months.
Now: (Market to Nokia). And why shouldn't I buy a cheap Chinese/Indian Android phone, buy my apps, and move up to a nice Android phone (with apps intact) later?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
It is a gamble, but not as much as a gamble as sticking with symbian, symbian has been dead for a while
Symbian still has the largest installed base of any phone OS, and was just recently surpassed by android as the most sold phone OS. It may have strong in a lower-end market segment with lower margins, and it may have been declining, but saying it was dead is just US-centric uninformed drivel. Transitioning away from it with an application compatibility path provided by Qt may have been a good strategy, but by just dumping it for microsoft WP7 they are basically committing harakiri in emerging markets where they are by far the strongest phone maker.
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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As an owner of a N900, and having used an iPhone and Android device once, I find Maemo's UI eye-gougingly horrible. The UI concepts are great (top-left everywhere to multitask, click the empty space to go back, bottom-right for fullscreen toggle, etc.) But the execution of the design is terrible. Nokia really doesn't know how to make advanced features easily accessible. To prove my point: Look at the wireless settings page. It looks like you scaled network-manager to that tiny screen. Now, look at the default file-browser. THAT'S HOW IT'S DONE, NOKIA. On a tiny device, you do NOT have controls that small. Next, look at the Phone application. That's supposed to be integrated with the contacts application! Did I mention how much MicroB sucks (checkerboard loading pattern, nonhildonized addons window) ? Or that ugly ripped off slide to unlock screen? Man, I wish that MeeGo HE was usable enough for daily use. I love how Maemo is open and all, but on a phone, no matter what you do, it sucks, plain and simple.
Nokia knows that they have no future with low-end phones in the developing world because a huge array of Chinese firms are now producing cheap phones and undercutting Nokia. This was a major point in the Burning Platform memo.