the "Nokia is dropping Symbian" post
This evening, at the official N900 meet-up in London, the Maemo marketing team revealed that Nokia plan to drop Symbian from the entire ‘top end’ N-Series range of handsets in favour of Maemo by 2012.
Finally, but still semi-officially, someone has the guts to put Nokia's plans into words. Plans that were really not that hard to figure out, mind you.
So, what is this?
An interesting experiment for Nokia. While doing this tomorrow would certainly make sense from the "we-must-appeal-to-Scoble" perspective, doing it "by 2012" (which, this being Nokia, probably means the end of 2012) is a lot tougher to understand.
By then, Symbian what, ^5, will be available? Is that still not good enough for high-end devices? Probably, but since I'm rather sure it hasn't yet gone into *any* development phase, how would anyone know that?
Again, strange, but expected. And even though Nokia might deny this tomorrow, I'm pretty sure it IS their actual plan.
Oh, and also expect S30 to disappear around the same time. Completely. Disappear. I'm hoping S40 will too (it really needs to), but that probably won't happen as it will be replacing S30 in the low-end. The same way Symbian will be replacing S40 mid-end. Get it now?
You know what's funny?
This ensures Symbian will be the #1 mobile OS (by sales - no, not by number of fart apps, thankfully) for at least 5 more years. Although no one will tell you that.
Why?
It will rule the mid-end. You know, the second best selling tier after, you guessed it, the low end, which basically offers no 'smart' phones.
As for Maemo... It's an interesting project, and I'm still waiting for version 6. And for a browser that doesn't advertise itself as being built on "Mozilla technology". And for portrait mode. And for it to be, you know, a proper smart*phone* platform. That, right now, it isn't.
But hopefully this time next year it will have become that.
Will it be too late?
It may actually be too early. But more on that on another day.
Now go, you've got 9567 "Nokia is ditching Symbian, which is dead and buried" very, very, smart posts to read elsewhere.
