
And so it goes, the OS that came from Psion's line of handheld's as EPOC, powered the first recognisable smartphone (the Ericsson R380, the earlier GEOS powered Nokia Communicator not qualifying by virtue of its mammoth size) and went on to dominate the smartphone market; has had time called and Nokia will kill it as early as 2012.
In truth Symbian has been dead ever since the arrival of the iPhone, its fans and makers being the only ones who hadn't realised. When Nokia made its laughable attempts to add touch to what was essentially the anti-touch OS it soon became clear that there was no hope for Symbian and it was only a matter of time before Nokia turned to its open-source stablemate, Maemo, previously restricted to the Finnish company's Internet Tablet range.
Today's announcement isn't a big surprise, it was inevitable once Nokia announced a Maemo-powered smartphone. What will be worth monitoring is the success, or otherwise, of the Maemo handsets that Nokia has planned. The company has gambled on an OS which has seen only limited support from the open source community and, given the emergence of Android as a credible open source competitor for the iPhone's crown, I wonder how much that will be improved with the release of version 5. My guess is that Symbian developers will not necessarily support Maemo, rather chasing the big markets of the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
I fear that Nokia would have been better served copying Sony-Ericsson and picking the best of each platform to test the market, rather than looking to develop a new platform from scratch.
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