Nokia, a company that spends more on R&D than most of it’s peers has decided to abandon Meego, it’s next generation smartphone Operating System and semi-abandon Symbian, the heart and soul of most of it’s current phones.
Official Statement about Meego:
Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
Official Statement about Symbian:
With Nokia’s planned move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.
Huh? What does that even mean? How does Nokia expect somebody to buy a Symbian device with that nonsense about “leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value“.
And for Meego, that sounds like the death knell. I wonder why they are even bothering to produce that oft delayed Meego phone anymore. Are they taking insiration from the Kin?
This is fantastic news for Microsoft though. With Apple and Android quickly taking over the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7’s future was sort of uncertain even though the product itself showed promise. With Nokia’s might behind it, WP7 is here to stay.
What Nokia is want to do is just to save money in the short term.
They will support open-source project.
It will work greatly on Nokia phones. So it will fly no harm done, if not – they will save a nice pot of money.
They can always fall back on it and modify slightly open-source to suit their needs.