Nokia Reasserts Control Over Symbian OS

jfruhlinger writes "Nokia is asserting its control over the Symbian OS that runs many of its smartphones, taking the tasks of developing the operating system away from the independent Symbian Foundation, which will now focus on licensing and intellectual property issues. Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS."

rumours of death are premature

[spectrokid]

their top-phones beat an iphone in any hardware category available at a lower price, and they still sell more phones than anybody else. If they can make a more flashy UI, they can become a serious problem for Apple, Retaking control of their OS is the first step

Re:I just can't help myself, but to see Symbian de

[MichaelSmith]

"Its easier to port a shell than a shell script"

Seriously, a shell along the lines of iOS or Android could be easily written for Symbian.

Re:They're still around?

[oji-sama]

Did you check the repo(s) for N900? I don't see why the store and vanilla Linux apps would be your only (nor primary) source?

Re:They're still around?

[sznupi]

Negative? When not presented as "percentage of growth" (deceiving if one player is much closer to the absolute limit "total number of mobile phones sold"), but as "annual growth in number of units shipped" - it's a top player.

And will continue to be big, if only because of being pushed into lower market segments (what happened to S30, which is still around, and S40, which is still around - in fact, is the most popular phone platform on the planet)

Not the last Symbian N-Series phone

[pavon]

Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego.

That has been heavily reported, but it is flat out wrong. They announced that the N8 is the last high-end phone to run Symbian^3 - future phones will run Meego or Symbian^4: source [nokia.com].