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?