The Symbian platform has been the cornerstone of the smartphone market, with a declining but still dominant marketshare - but for how much longer?
Mobile-review.com claims in a recent article that Nokia will no longer use Symbian in it's highest-end phones - instead Nokia will only use it where competing on price.
This claim, if true, together with the fact that Symbian ^4 is going to break application compatibility (devices from 2010) seem to indicate that Symbian is moving decidedly downmarket - while it's likely to still be a "smartphone" platform, in the technical sense that it will be able to run applications written for the phone (and not just in Java), I predict that Symbian's new target might be (or should be) to seriously unify the mid-range phone market. This is actually a good thing, and I hope it happens - there's simply no need (for example) to have the Nokia/Sony Ericsson "reversed" key approach, which are fossils from internally developed device OSes. This is also a good thing, because the lowest common denominator might become Symbian rather than Java.
Of course, perhaps this was all Symbian really ever was (sorry about the formatting *cough*). Mobile-review.com also suggests that Maemo is Nokia's new "high-end" OS, the true response to Apple/RIM/etc. One wonders how many platforms there can be before platform fatigue/irrelevancy sets in. Nokia should pray that Windows Mobile 7 is not as delcious as Windows 7 in its arena.
