Posts Tagged ‘symbian’

Nokia – U-turn on Symbian

Nokia has said Symbian will not be discontinued despite a recent partnership with Microsoft to make Windows 7 the main operating platform for its phones.

This is a U-turn on the phone manufacturer’s original stance. Nokia plans to continue selling Symbian devices because it is obliged to do so, according to several reports.

“Just because we are changing our direction in terms of a smartphone platform, it doesn’t mean that the existing platform is completely broken,” said Vlasta Berka, general manager for Nokia Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, at the launch of the E7 smartphone in Singapore.

“We still have obligations to our users, developers, business partners and customers.” There are 200 million Symbian users globally, and Nokia expects to sell about 150 million devices. “Symbian is here to stay,” Berka added.

Symbian to close down its websites

Symbian’s presence on the web is stripped away as the mobile operating system moves back to Nokia. Earlier this month, the Symbian foundation said troubled handset maker Nokia would take over development of the open-source OS, with the foundation remaining in charge of licensing.

The organisation has stated that all of the websites hosted by the Symbian Foundation will be shut down on 17^th December, as well as its Facebook page and Twitter feed. On its website, the foundation said “We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation”.

Nokia bought Symbian in 2008, taking it open source. The code was freely available at the beginning of the year, but just two phones, the Nokia N8 and Nokia C7-00, are running the latest iteration, Symbian^3.

The heat is on for smartphone makers

In the competition for smartphone brand loyalty, a survey by GfK has found that more than half of all smartphone owners (56%) were undecided over their next handsets, with only Apple commanding a significant degree of loyalty.

With features like GPS, media players and Wi Fi increasingly the norm across the board, owners of web-enabled phones are more concerned with ease of access to services and app stores. There has been an explosion of new choices on the market over the last year, with Android, Windows Phone 7, and with new versions of Symbian, the RIM OS and Meego in the pipeline.

The survey found that only 25% of smartphone owners planned to stay loyal to the operating system running their phone, with loyalty highest among Apple users at 59%, and lowest for Microsoft’s mobile software, at 21%.

Just over a third of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry users said they would stay loyal, compared with 28% for users of phones running Google’s Android software, and 24% for users of Nokia Symbian phones.

The survey, that consisted of 2,653 mobile phone users in Britain, the US, Brazil, Germany Spain and China; also found that 37% of “dumb” handset owners planned to upgrade to a smartphone with their next handset.