An open letter to Nokia developers makes it clear that Symbian is just going to fade away.
Nokia‘s VP Purnima Kochikar has sent an open letter to its developer community to let everyone know what is going on.
Dear Nokia Developer,
Much has been said in the last few weeks about Nokia’s announced strategy.First, let’s recap what it is we announced; the three main areas of our strategy:
- Plans for a broad strategic partnership with Microsoft on Windows Phone
- Connecting the Next Billion
- Future disruptive technologies
Over the past weeks we have been evaluating our Symbian roadmap and now feel confident we will have a strong portfolio of new products during our transition period – i.e. 2011 and 2012.
The letter continues saying how powerful these devices are, and how updates will keep arriving.
About the transition with the Nokia Windows Phones, Kochikar says:
We hope to bring devices based on Windows Phone to market as quickly as possible, but Windows Phone will not have all language and all localization capabilities from day one.
In many markets, including markets where Symbian is currently the lead smartphone platform with significant market share such as China, India, Russia and Turkey, we will continue to make our Symbian portfolio as competitive as possible while we work with Microsoft to introduce Windows Phone.
Our intention is that when users come to the end of the natural lifecycle of their Symbian device they will make the change to a Nokia Windows Phone device and so it would not be in our interests to undermine their Nokia smartphone experience.
This clearly means that the days of Symbian OS are indeed numbered, and that with the exception of some niche market there won’t be any more Symbian smartphones after 2012.