Nokia to Kill Symbian with N8 Successor

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia will send the Symbian platform to the graveyard sooner than originally announced, if the latest reports on the matter are to be believed. 

There will be only one new Symbian model pushed to shelves from Nokia, and it will arrive as the successor of the Nokia N8 flagship phone. 

Nokia will continue to deliver updates to existing customers, but it does not plan on making available for purchase new models running under the platform, The Register reports. 

Most probably, the handset vendor will continue producing existing Nokia Belle devices, but it has put an end on the development of new models. 

A year ago, Nokia announced plans to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its primary operating system for smartphones, and to reduce development of Symbian devices. 

However, it did commit to the release of new Symbian devices, and even said that it expected to sell around 150 million such phones before the platform went into the ground in a few years. 

But things turned out unexpectedly, and sales of Symbian devices dropped below the forecast figure. 

During the company’s earnings call for the fourth quarter of the last year, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that was so due to changing market conditions. 

“We now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated,” he said. 

Apparently, this was the final hit for Symbian. In Nokia’s opinion, any continuation of efforts to keep the platform alive will be in vain. Thus, it has decided to stop the development of new devices. 

For the time being, Nokia did not deliver a confirmation on the matter, and there’s no telling on what will happen with the Symbian developers that Accenture took from Nokia. Nor with the people at Nokia who have been still working on Symbian-related projects. 

However, if things are indeed so, the mobile phone maker will unveil its plans soon, so stay tuned to learn the news.

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