Keeping the faith
Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop has put to rest the assumptions that the company's Symbian OS would be put into retirement when it switches to Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform later in the year. In an interview on the Chinese Nokia Conversations blog (video in English), Elop stated that the company would be continuing to invest in the Symbian platform, even as it steps down from its place as Nokia's flagship mobile OS.
Asked in the interview to describe Nokia's current stance on Symbian, Elop said that the company is "in a period where the investment in Symbian absolutely continues. Even as we go though a transition to our primary platform, Windows Phone, you'll see that continued investment. And I know there have been questions about so how long does that continue and we've now been very clear about that, that software updates to Symbian devices are expected until at least 2016. So there's a long history still to be paved for Symbian in the future."
Asked to be "really clear" Elop confirmed that that would include "customer service, apps... all of the elements that [Nokia's] customers would currently get." So while Symbian isn't going to be at the forefront of Nokia's strategy, it's decidedly not being left behind.
Although continued support for Symbian doesn't necessary mean that we'll see new devices using the platform, it would seem unlikely for Nokia to promise such long-term support unless it wasn't planning to use the OS. Keeping a couple of Symbian devices in its line-up would give Nokia a differentiator not available to its competitors, in a market increasingly using just a small number of ubiquitous operating systems on ever more similar hardware.
