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

The end of Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

...is coming in 2012!

Re:The end of Nokia

[Tor]

The biggest issue was not that they abandoned Symbian. They were already set to do that anyway, what with MeeGo taking over on their highest-end devices and gradually onto mid-tier smartphones.

The biggest blunder was that they abandoned Qt as a development platform. That was their one strategy that would have kept new applications and development coming. You'd write an app using Qt (with some enhancements), and would with minimal effort be able to tailor both Symbian^3 and MeeGo devices.

That train has now left the station. There is now NO SINGLE application environment that a developer can use to tailor current and future Nokia phones. Not Java/J2ME. Not Symbian. Not MeeGo/Maemo. Not Qt.

Nokia has made a lot of serious blunders throughout the last few years (the N85 hardware quality, the N97 software quality, an ASD style management, etc). Allowing themselves to be completely hijacked by Elan/Microsoft for a last ditch futile attempt to promote WP7 is nothing short of astounding. The worlds largest cell phone maker, and at one point in recent history Europe's most valuable company, completely destroyed as little more than a pawn in Steve Ballmer's clumsy quest for making Microsoft relevant again is simply nothing short of astounding.

Nokias. Biggest. Blunder. Ever.

Re:The end of Nokia

[eshefer]

yeah.

from a buisness POV this makes even less sense.

if winmo7 fails - they're dead.
If the Winmo7 strategy works, everyone will go tho winmo7 and gut them. then they'll be dead.

Nokia's ex-CEO said something about wsitching to android is like peeing yourself in winter time for warmth. all I see when I look at Nokia is a giant puddle, and the urin wasn't even warm to begin with.

Re:The end of Nokia

[erroneus]

I basically agree with you. It was definitely not the decision to ditch Symbian. Frankly, I was never impressed with Symbian in the first place. I never got a chance to play with MeeGo because they abandoned my N810 before they could port the software over to it.

And the decision to go with Windows phone? Well, pretty much everyone knew what that meant from the first news of it. I have never known a happy Windows phone user. Never. Not one. Some might intuitively thing the best MS Exchange support would be found there -- wrong -- it was iPhone. Microsoft once measured their success by how much "piracy" was going on with their apps, their OSes and the apps written for their OSes. "Look how popular we are!" Have a look at any file sharing site... see anything for Windows phones? I can't say that I have ever seen anything except, perhaps, OS update loads for Dell Axiom... I know, not a phone, but you see have far I had to go?

Microsoft isn't ever going to be mainstream with their Windows phones.

And still the industries out there cannot manage to resist Microsoft's call. When Microsoft partners up with you, watch out. If the partnership goes bad, you are the loser. If the partnership goes good, Microsoft will buy you in short order. This has been going on for a very long time. No one seems to notice.

Re:The end of Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia's ex-CEO said something about wsitching to android is like peeing yourself in winter time for warmth. all I see when I look at Nokia is a giant puddle, and the urin wasn't even warm to begin with.

You have to see it in context. The "ex-CEO" was referring to Nokia, who had the strings for QT and Meego on handsets in their hands. To not develop that and instead go for a competitor's platform would be a waste of resources. Furthermore, it wasn't Nokia's ex-CEO, but the guy who Nokia's board ditched for the M$ trojan that is CEO now, even though he had been next in line. To the end he was extremely pro-Meego, i.e. pro-Open Source. When word came out that the board of directors (some say due to pressure from big American investors) chose the trojan he handed in his resignation, and thus all hope for an open handset line with Nokia hardware was crushed.

Re:Goodbye Nokia, it was nice knowing you.

[theweatherelectric]

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.

Re:Cold dead hands

[1s44c]

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.

Re:Old news, but thank God!

[dsvilko]

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.

Re:Mind the gap

[Compaqt]

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?

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.