Nokia plans to release Symbian phones in 2012 and is obligated to support them for two years, according to a report, keeping Nokia tied to Symbian until at least 2014.
While Nokia
has committed to making Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile operating system its
priority, it reportedly plans to support the Symbian OS at least through 2014.
According to
an April 14 report from Australia IT, Nokia's Australian managing
director, Chris Carr, told the tech site that Nokia is contractually obligated
to support new devices for two years-and the phone maker has already committed
to releasing new Symbian phones in 2011 and 2012.
"There's
still a lot of ongoing development with Symbian, the two will co-exist,"
he said, according to the site. "We've invested a lot money in
Symbian."
On April 12,
Nokia introduced two new steel-and-glass smartphones, the enterprise-geared E6
and the entertainment-ready X7, running an updated version of Symbian,
nicknamed "Anna." (Nokia plans to, alphabetically, give women's names
to its version of Symbian, according to the Aussie site, just as Google has
moved alphabetically through desserts, from Cupcake through Gingerbread.)
"With
these new products and more Symbian devices and user enhancements coming in the
near future, we are confident we can keep existing Nokia smartphone customers
engaged, as well as attract new first-time and competitor smartphone
users," Jo Harlow, head of Nokia's Smart Devices business, said in a
statement.
The phones are
expected to arrive later this quarter, and the Nokia N8, E7, C7 and C6-01
smartphones will able to download the Symbian Anna update "in coming
months," said Nokia.
While the Anna
update has been controversial-though a major selling point of Symbian was its open-source
nature, that's no longer the case-Nokia added in its April 12
announcement that Symbian Anna "greatly enhances the user experience on
Nokia smartphones and makes the Qt business opportunity with Nokia even
greater."
The same day,
it issued a separate press release, announcing that its 158 developers had each
passed 1 million downloads in its Ovi Store, and the store is now seeing 5
million downloads per day.
"This
momentum continues to demonstrate consumers' appetite for Nokia's global and
locally relevant apps, and will help us plan the future apps store experience
for improved and new Symbian devices, as well as Nokia smartphones based on the
planned collaborative opportunities with Microsoft," Tero Ojanpera,
Nokia's executive vice president of services and developer experience, said in
the statement.
Nokia's Carr
added in his interview with Australia IT that, "it's not unusual in the
industry to have multiple OS strategies." And indeed, Nokia additionally
plans to support at least one device running MeeGo, the mobile OS it developed
with Intel and introduced at the Mobile Word Congress event in 2010.
During a
keynote address at Mobile World Congress the following year (video of which is
posted at GSMArena), Nokia CTO Rich Green confirmed
that device would be the N950 smartphone.
"We had
long, hard discussions about this ... but there's a lot of work that's gone
into the technology, there's a lot of really interesting user interface and
platform design work, some very elegant hardware. We have made a change in
plan, this is a strategic change, and so we are committed to shipping the
one," Green said.
Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.
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