Nokia confirms switch to MeeGo for high-end phones
updated 11:25 am EDT, Thu June 24, 2010
Nokia says Nseries to drop Symbian
Nokia on Thursday confirmed that it will drop Symbian from its Nseries phones. A spokesperson said that all of the high-end devices after the N8 will use MeeGo, the OS co-designed with Intel. It's not known if the work-oriented Eseries or other models would use MeeGo, but most are still expected to use Symbian^3 or S40.
The switch would be a major blow to Symbian, which depends almost exclusively on Nokia for its current majority market share in the smartphone business. It also reflects Nokia's increasing frustration with steady losses in share as its reliance on Symbian has seen customers leave for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone devices instead.
Nokia has lately had a dearth of high-end phones and has had to issue an earnings warning. The N8 may not ship until late in the summer, and the rumored N9 may not arrive until late in the year or 2011.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2004
N Series is already not Symbians major platform
Nokia sells a lot of feature phones, and a lot of smartphones, but those smartphones are in the 'feature phone' replacement category - i.e. in the lower end of the market spectrum.
Those phones, as far as we know now, will continue to have Symbian. The N Series is Nokias high end - and slower selling series of phones. Hopefully they won't remain slow selling with MeeGo, but my point is, that as far as Symbian is concerned they weren't moving phones in this category anyway, and this move just reflects that.
It's still, kind of indicative of where Symbian is heading, but I think the major issue for Symbian is the OS just isn't very good, and thats been clear for a while. Still the upcoming N8 is an S^3 phone, and S^3 should migrate down to the X-Series, eventually, so...Symbian has time to work the bugs out - just not much time.