RIP Symbian: Nokia's ageing mobile OS put in "maintenance mode"

Gerald Lynch Mobile phones, Tech Digest news
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Nokia also just announced a new QWERTY slider, the E7, or E7-00 as it's otherwise known. Running Symbian^3, it has dual 8 MP and VGA video calling cameras, as well as a 4 inch capacitive touchscreen. Business orientated, it has presentation editing appsNokia have finally laid to rest Symbian, their aged mobile OS that initially brought them great success in the smartphone race before dragging them beneath the waves of competition.

Nokia have announced that the operating system is now to enter “maintenance mode”, which means that apart from fixing the odd major bug, Symbian will receive no new updates, effectively killing the OS.

The decision to pull the plug on Symbian was spotted by a Nokia E7 user, who filed a bug report on Nokia’s Drive app, only to be met with this response from Nokia:

“Thank you for your improvement ideas, thus (sic) Symbian is in maintenance mode and no new features will be implement[ed] without extremely good reason (business case). We have written down your ideas for future development if there is a chance that new features will be released.”

In the early days of the smartphone race, Symbian led the charge in successful handsets such as the N95 and N96. But with the advent of the iPhone, shortly followed by the rise of Android, Symbian began to look very dated indeed.

Nokia eventually renamed the OS Nokia Belle, but that wasn’t enough to slow declining sales of phones running the OS. Nokia eventually partnered up with Microsoft and their Windows Phone platform, which now stands as Nokia’s lead operating system for their mobiles.

Via: Phone Arena

Gerald Lynch
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12 comments

  • Very interesting news. So where is the E7 successor? Where should E7 customers go to now as Nokia did not yet release a landscape qwerty slider with Windows Phone. I personally would love to switch to Windows Phone but I need a hardware keyboard. Testing with Lumia 800 and 900 was not acceptable. So I am waiting for a qwerty landscape slider with Windows Phone to dump my E7.

  • An easy step later on 4 US here @ Home. No Symbian means No Nokia anymore… Byebye Would rather stay with Nokia is they deside running on Android. But don’t think they are smart enough admitting that its running better then WP.

  • Very interesting news. So where is the E7 successor? Where should E7 customers go to now as Nokia did not yet release a landscape qwerty slider with Windows Phone. I personally would love to switch to Windows Phone but I need a hardware keyboard. Testing with Lumia 800 and 900 was not acceptable. So I am waiting for a qwerty landscape slider with Windows Phone to dump my E7.

  • feel pity with symbian… belle/belle fp1 catch up with the game but end up being killed…

    nokia didnt realize that symbian smartphones still outsold its lumia phones and WP as a whole! q2 2012 and q3 2012 shows that symbian is still on top of WP even though lumia is heavily promoted by nokia and symbian isnt….

    i pity symbian… they deserve to be continue..even for low end..not the shitty asha s40 OS which is btw not a smartphone, cant multitask and has stupid java apps!!!! i mean whats the purpose of 1ghz processor on asha but cant multitask… symbian is also at 1ghz and 256 RAM and can multitask smoothly and do the stuff that android can!!! and android is the baby of symbian…it is a product of symbian engineers….

  • An easy step later on 4 US here @ Home. No Symbian means No Nokia anymore… Byebye Would rather stay with Nokia is they deside running on Android. But don't think they are smart enough admitting that its running better then WP.

  • feel pity with symbian… belle/belle fp1 catch up with the game but end up being killed…

    nokia didnt realize that symbian smartphones still outsold its lumia phones and WP as a whole! q2 2012 and q3 2012 shows that symbian is still on top of WP even though lumia is heavily promoted by nokia and symbian isnt….

    i pity symbian… they deserve to be continue..even for low end..not the shitty asha s40 OS which is btw not a smartphone, cant multitask and has stupid java apps!!!! i mean whats the purpose of 1ghz processor on asha but cant multitask… symbian is also at 1ghz and 256 RAM and can multitask smoothly and do the stuff that android can!!! and android is the baby of symbian…it is a product of symbian engineers….

  • Well if it’s going it is with a major refresh on Mrs. P’s C7 (arrived this week) and hopefully my N8 soon. That said, I’ll be looking for an upgrade at year end so no loyalty to symbian required. We noticed that even in Finland this summer their tourist information only had apps for apple and android so the home support has gone

  • Well if it's going it is with a major refresh on Mrs. P's C7 (arrived this week) and hopefully my N8 soon. That said, I'll be looking for an upgrade at year end so no loyalty to symbian required. We noticed that even in Finland this summer their tourist information only had apps for apple and android so the home support has gone

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