Yesterday we questioned why anyone would jump on board the dying Symbian smartphone platform when Nokia announced its new X7 and E6 smartphones. Today Nokia gave us the answer – they’re not taking the platform off life support until 2013 at least.
At a breakfast briefing with Nokia this morning, Australian top-dog Chris Carr told us that the Finnish handset maker had Symbian smartphones on the roadmap into 2012 at least.
In other words, Nokia is planning to see the Symban and Windows Phone 7 smartphone operating systems coexist, at least in the short term. Carr couldn’t tell us whether or not Symbian played a role in the company’s plans beyond 2012, but emphasised that plenty of other manufacturers released hardware on different mobile operating systems like they woud next year.
Carr also confirmed that Australia would be seeing its first WP7 Nokia handset in the first half of next year – a huge window, and nothing we didn’t really know already.
With Symbian confirmed to live on for another 18 months at least, is that enough to convince people the platform is worth choosing over iOS, Android, WP7 or Blackberry? Anyone?
Adrian Cascun-Valencic
Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 1:44 PMSuffice to say: provided the camera UI has been updated as part of the recent “Anna” update, I’ll gladly take N8 as my next phone. I rely on Outlook synchronisation, and call me paranoid but I don’t trust Google (or any other cloud) with all my personal data.
Continued Sym^3 support for one more contract cycle gives WP7 and Android time to mature to the point where they can match the specific elements of Symbian that I find essential, so count me among the few!
Jamie Borg
Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 2:20 PMI…….. concur
Jarrad Evans
Friday, April 15, 2011 at 9:34 AMI too agree
Brant
Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 1:28 AMStrange, I thought they fired all the people working on Symbian?