Nokia's 808 PureView Officially the End of the Symbian Line

Snirt writes "Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company's earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: 'During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,' the company wrote. 'The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.'"

Comments

I didn't like it

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't like it when the Symbians kidnapped Patty Hearst, but their phones were OK for a while.

Re:I didn't like it

[cshark]

Both systems are expensive, clunky, profit losing failures. I wish Nokia would go with Android. Their hardware isn't bad.

Re:I didn't like it

[Kjella]

People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.

That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.

Re:I didn't like it

[mister2au]

Take the n900, make it thiner and lighter, with longer battery life, a faster processor, and a better screen.

Gee ... is that all ... faster and better screen but also better battery life ... and the battery can't be bigger because it has to be thinner and lighter ???

Upgrade the camera too but keep the nice keyboard.

While still making it thinner and lighter?

How about they offer that phone with a choice of Windows or Maemo?

Ok now I think the whole post was just sarcasm ???

You are suggesting a struggling company piles on the R&D to get a more feature packed phone with better battery life while staying smaller and supporting 2 different operating systems ... Sounds reasonable

Sorry to see Symbian go

[johanw]

Symbian phones were very feature complete (much more so than Android and iOS, my E72 has functionality that even now isn't standard on those) and I don't like to see it go. I still use a Nokia E72 as my primary phone and plan to do so for some more years, I even bought a spare used E72 in case something happens to it. Now that rooting Symbian is easy I even get functionality that was Android specific for some time, like adblocking with a hostsfile. And of course a week of battary use, get that from any current device.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[gstoddart]

I'm betting you'd only get the core OS, but most of the stuff related to actual telephony would be patented/proprietary.

I'd be surprised if you could fully operate your phone with the open source bits -- but admittedly, that's mostly just a guess.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[gl4ss]

well, of symbian^4 (or 4 or wtf it was supposed to be, who the fuck knows since apparently whenever they reorganized the new guy at the top thought that instead of fixing things it was just important to rename things) you would've gotten the ui(and well, not that much else relevant for making a phone..).

it was axed though(the four), but they did do one public commit of the tree at least which included homescreen. around the axing they decided to go all qml.
so you'd get some ui pieces for a dead tree.

and earlier symbian source.. well, if you want to go insane, take a look. there's really nothing that much worthwhile saving there without properiaty phone stack to go along with it.. so you could run the whole phone on a single arm chip or execute in place from rom. symbian did some neat tricks like that, but with current chip pricing they don't matter that much.

the reason why the story isn't pretty is that always they just went adding api's instead of fixing them. as if stacking an extra api on top of a broken one would fix the broken api underneath! how the fuck that's supposed to work? I'll suddenly get videoframes from the original api underneath by adding an extra layer on top of it? it wasn't most of the time that big of a problem that the api was totally obscure to use but that it was just plain unimplemented to do half the things it should have done now that was a real problem! but due to the totally broken chain of authority nobody could be arsed to do the work to actually tell people to do the fucking fixes. this plays a major role in why the whole symbian got axed and dumped, the organization was deemed to be bloated beyond repairable, employing 10x the people needed and that just impaired the development - every reorg they did just made things worse and at the height of the organizations size they were still relying on contractors for writing critical pieces of code all the way from kernel to ui. another reason of course is that elop is one lazy fat bastard and this was a very easy way out of the mess for him - just take n9's shell, license sw from MS and call it a day - or rather call it two years of work in a day, but hey at least he didn't have to deal with aholes who had entrenched themselves as guardians of buggy code.

and they should just have gone android. or rather they should have done the open source aspect of symbian properly back in the day and should have made symbian into what became android. you don't execute a successful open source strategy by at the same time releasing source while you lock the platform from unauthorized code!

anyone doing a new phone os now from existing base is just going to go android now, jolla excluded and even them I think would have done better to go with android and extend it.. instead of what they're doing now. easy to find drivers/socs, plenty of sw.. complete open source package to roll the os with and less chance of just going clinically insane.

That's too bad, RIP Symbian...

[VP]

What is worse is that it is hard to find any existing Symbian devices...

For all the drawbacks of Symbian, the combination of a camera that put to shame any other cellphones, and the built-in capabilities of the phone (e.g. a complete SIP stack, integrated with the regular phone functionality) is still unmatched. Even Nokia themselves cannot replicate the hardware capabilities of the 808 in a Windows phone, because the OS can't handle them...

oh no!!!

[sunking2]

Women love them so much though!!!

Get your gruesome details here:

[whoever57]

Detailed analysis of Nokia.