Nokia drops Symbian for its N-Series phones

Nokia will drop Symbian on its top-end N-Series phones in favour of Maemo – that’s the latest rumour flying around the tech blogosphere after a marketing manager at a Nokia N900 meet-up said yesterday that Symbian “…would not be used on N-Series between now and 2012.”

This is huge news. Nokia have spent a fortune on Symbian, both in extending the operating system, and in buying Symbian – the company – for 264 million Euros back in June 2008. To admit that Maemo will be used in its high end phones in the future is a tacit admission that Symbian has fallen behind in the smartphone race and can no longer support the kind of features that smartphone users have come to expect.

More details after the jump.

This shouldn’t really come as a shock. Symbian’s limitations for smartphones were evident in the Nokia N97, which offered a poor experience compared to the competition. When the Maemo-based N900 was launched recently to critical acclaim, the writing was on the wall for Symbian. If Nokia, the company that’s taken Symbian further than anyone else, can’t create a decent smartphone using it, what hope does anyone else have?

Samsung proved this two weeks ago by announcing that they were dropping Symbian, too, in favour of Windows Mobile and Android.

Nokia will still be using Symbian in the future for some of its mid-range phones – but for the N-Series, it’s Maemo all the way.

[Source: The Really Mobile Project]