November 9th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A, Platforms: Symbian | No Comments »
The rumors are true, the Symbian Foundation is winding down, but symbian itself won’t. In fact, Nokia has announced it will be taking Symbian back in-house, not long after the EU funded it.
This step by Nokia shows the vendor still has full trust in the operating system and will be supporting and further developing it. This move also further confirms that Android and Windows Phone devices from Nokia are not likely anytime soon.
“Nokia believes in Symbian because we know that it isthe only platform capable of serving our global audience with a range of devices carrying locally relevant content and services. We also believe that decisions were needed to make Symbian more competitive and attractive to developers. That’s why we announced we would focus on Qt and Qt Quick for application development. Qt is itself a thriving open source framework and already a firm favourite with many developers because of its ability to accelerate the development of rich, visual applications. We will focus on Qt and Qt Quick for our own development for both Symbian and the MeeGo platform, which means that applications developed in Qt for Symbian now will still work on Nokia MeeGo devices in the future (we’re planning 2011 for launch of MeeGo products). Finally, focusing on a single framework means that there will be no break between current and future versions of Symbian on Nokia devices. Anything developed for the latest range of Nokia Symbian smartphones would work on future devices, and importantly, any future developments of the Symbian user experience would benefit users of the recently launched products like the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, recently shipped Nokia C6 or soon to be shipped Nokia E7.”
