Samsung to Discontinue Symbian Developer Support; Not a Good Start for the Nokia Corporate Re-vamp
Samsung has announced today that the company would no longer support the development of Nokia’s Symbian platform. The announcement was made in a letter via Samsung mobile innovator forum. The brief announcement gave the rollback schedule, pointing towards the complete shutdown for Symbian support till the end of this year.
Symbian Platform was launched in 2008 to manage the open source Symbian OS. Samsung has followed SonyEricsson in this Symbian abandonment move. Just last week, news of “No new Symbian handests to be offered by SonyEricsson” surfaced. Here, it is important to note that Samsung has only discontinued support for the development of Symbian , however, no hints are given about the manufacturing of new Symbian handsets. PCWorld makes some good notes:
Officially, Samsung has long maintained that it has a multi-platform strategy that includes Symbian, but the company hasn’t announced a Symbian-based smartphone since February last year. Instead, the world’s second largest phone maker has chosen to push smartphones based on its own platform, Bada, as well as Android and Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7. Samsung is a very opportunistic company when it comes operating systems, according to Carolina Milanesi , research vice president at Gartner: if a big operator such as Vodafone asked the company to manufacture a Symbian-based smartphone it likely would, she said.
This news comes as a hard blow to Nokia’s corporate revamp initiatives. Samsung, a close rival (the second largest phone manufacturer) withdrawing support at this time, shows that, Nokia faces no easy task in regaining market leader position. Interestingly, it is not the only battle, as Nokia prepares for lawsuit by Apple.
The continuous updates rolling out for Google Android do not make it any easier for Symbian Developer team. The future of Symbian OS is an integral determinant of Nokia’s overall future in the smart phone industry. This is why Nokia should up their game and come up with something absolutely boombastic about Symbian.
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