Nokia dumps Symbian on N-series
MeeGo all the way
The Nokia N8, to be released later this year, will be the last N-Series handset running Symbian. From then on it's MeeGo all the way.
That's not to say that Nokia will be dropping Symbian entirely, but the Finns have long seen it as the perfect OS for spreading the smart phone joy into the less well-off demographic, so it should come as no surprise that its own flagship handsets will be switching to MeeGo.
"Going forward, N-series devices will be based on MeeGo" a Nokia spokesman told Reuters. That's pretty clear, and means those rushing out to buy an N8 will find themselves cut off from future N-Series applications.
It also raises the question of which OS will run the N9, which was expected to emerge shortly after the N8. Nokia's been getting good press for keeping the price of the N8 down in comparison to the iPhone, but perhaps that's in order to make way for a higher-priced iPhone 4 competitor running MeeGo.
Symbian will remain on lower-end devices, and if Nokia can push Qt hard enough (and the company is certainly putting its back into it at the moment) then perhaps cross-platform applications will smooth the technical gap. But sustaining two incompatible smartphone platforms won't be easy, even for Nokia. ®
COMMENTS
I'm still struggling to understand
What Nokia found so hard about making Symbian competitive? Oh, hang on, didn't they almost have a front runner with Series 90, which they killed off?
Re: no need for Meego on the N900
And this attitude is why I ditched my N800 for a Droid instead of an N900.
In on a Hurricane, out on a whimper
Oh, it's like seeing the once primetime TV giants Little & Large now doing the end of a pier for £2 per ticket with more empty seats than not.
Except Little & Large were always shite. Symbian was just botched by Nokia the moment they wrestled control from Psion.
Blame game
As an ex-Symbian employee, it always looked to me that Symbian was botching Symbian. Their own lack of expertise in the basics of software development, and costly reliance on squads of defect fixers instead of good coders and designers, made them slow and unresponsive. Lots of Golden Hammers and magic formulae to be protected by people with a vested interest in preserving their own status and none in promoting innovation.
Too many people in Symbian basked in the reflected glory of the original set of clever people who started it all up and then bailed. In the end what emerged was a pretty dumb company. These guys actually reviewed code as if it was theatre performance, fer chrissake!
Newer, Faster, Better...
I'm hanging with the n800, I will not pay $40/month for service I do not need. Wifi fits all my needs, except when I'm driving... which isn't a bad thing. I also don't need a Google impregnated JE on top of a locked linux kernel. F the data miners.
The shite of the n800 is the latest OS doesn't run many crucial apps because the loader doesn't recognize the libs(newer?) and always tells me installation failed b/c of missing depend's. I can't even get samba shares to mount regularly. Community support entails JFGI replies or endless vi's and vims and cli commands beyond this hobbyist's skill level. Sounds like the n900 users will feel that same pain sooner than later, too.
Symbian>>>Maemo>>>Meego>>>YouGo buy something newer.
