14 DAY TRIAL // Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has been reported a few days ago to plan making some changes when it comes to the operating systems that it will use on its future high-end devices. According to some people from the company's Maemo marketing team, Symbian will be removed from future N-Series phones by 2012, and Maemo will take its place.
However, it seems that the team has said something that it wasn't supposed to say at the Nokia N900 London meeting, at least this is what a recent post on Nokia's Blog states. When asked about its plans, the company stated that the speculations were premature, and that both Symbian and Maemo are viable platforms that will be used on future device.
The official response from Nokia, as cited by The Nokia Blog, says the following: “While it is our policy not to disclose details of our product roadmap, we’d like to explicitly communicate that we remain firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice. Any speculation on what our 2012 roadmap, including operating systems and product branding, are completely premature.
As we have stated earlier, Nokia has multiple platforms to serve different purposes and address different markets. Symbian is more successful than ever in bringing smartphones to the masses. Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you’d typically find inside a desktop computer. It delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address.”
Those reading closely the statement will notice that the company does not say explicitly that the N-Series phones will continue to feature Symbian on board, but that doesn't mean that they won't. Indeed, making speculations on what the handset vendor will do three years from now is a little premature, but one should agree that, at least in theory, it sounded quite nice having a wider range of Nokia phones running under Maemo.