Nokia: MeeGo for high end, Symbian for everything else
By Jenny • Jun 29th, 2010 • Category: Industry News, Nokia
- Photo: Nokia
As Nokia’s transition to the new generation of smartphones continues, the company is finding itself in an increasingly difficult position. To their credit, though, the Finnish mobile phones giant is beginning to show signs of a clear strategy, announcing MeeGo will become the sole mobile OS on high-end phones.
N-Series all MeeGo
Nokia has announced that its entire N-Series lines of phones will be powered by MeeGo only. This puts the recently released Nokia N8 in the unusual position of being the first and last N-Series Nokia handset with Symbian^3 as its mobile OS.
Symbian pushed into feature phones
As such, Nokia’s Symbian OS will be increasingly used throughout the company’s feature phones lineup and pushed down to lower scale devices. This move will unify the oft-fragmented (and widely differing) mobile OS solutions in the Nokia feature phones lineups.
Why’s this important? Well, Nokia feature phones are the company’s current money-spinners, an area where Nokia is the out-and-out leader. The problem is this market is shrinking fast as smartphone growth explodes. Considering Nokia are struggling in the growing smartphones market, the company needs to eek out every cent of revenue it can from its feature phones category to bide it time while it’s much talked about smartphone turnaround happens.
Smart strategy for a big problem
- Photo: Nokia
The latest build of Symbian has been received well, while a video demo of MeeGo for tablets was inspiring. This suggests that Nokia is at least alive to the problem of fragmentation it has at the top end of its devices, as well as at the lower end. And it has software engineers capable of building a highly competitive mobile OS.
Whether this will be enough against companies that sell 1.7 million units of their new handset in three days is yet to be seen, but based on our experience with the great hardware meets so-so software that was the Nokia N900, the Finnish giant certainly has it in them. Especially if they give the software the attention it deserves and is seemingly getting now.
Tags for this article: MeeGo, mobile OS, Nokia N8, Nokia N900, symbian
Nokia did bad for maemo and N900 by introducing meego. It means that N900 is not supported anymore and developers will have no interest to create new apps for maemo.
I wanted to buy N900 myself but never after this news. This thing would never happen to IPhone
MeeGo, Maemo, and Symbian are all based on the same developer software platform QT. So, while there will be no support from Nokia other than bug fixes and necessary updates. Maemo will still get plenty of new apps once people start making apps for MeeGo and Symbian^3/4 because you can use the same apps on Maemo. The N900 is a great phone but if you don’t want to buy it wait for the N9 or buy the N8.