Update(26th July): Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian has written a far more comprehensive rebuttal of ARCchart's speculation.
ARCchart, a website affiliated to the investment banking and advisory group ARC associates, has recently published a report suggesting that Nokia might consider dumping Symbian altogether, porting its Series 60 user interface to a Linux platform.
Their reasons basically center around the fact that Symbian Ltd. has striven to assert it's independence by projecting a a vendor agnostic stance, and Nokia's recent failure to take complete control of Symbian. (Nokia has 47.9% ownership.)
Our opinion is that Nokia is unlikely to drop Symbian completely; but instead of pushing Series 60 further down into its mainstream handset portfolio, Nokia is likely to leave Symbian only for it's higher end models. This has already happened: While the N-Series is tomorrow's cutting edge (and are powered by Symbian Series 60), the recently announced Nokia slide form-factor phones are entirely Series 40. This would have been surprising a year ago, because it seemed as though Series 40 phones were "disallowed" from having truly advanced features; but some of those slide phones have 2.0MP cameras, and are even quadband - features which no Nokia has as of today, but are the mainstream of tomorrow.
Keeping Symbian around simply for use in Series 90 is a no-brainer, the 5 dollar cost of the Symbian licence for those handsets is tiny, compared to the likely developmental costs of a linux based Series 90 interface; particularly when Series 90 works pretty well today. This low cost reasoning also applies to Nokia's high end Series 60 handsets. For example, the Nokia 7610 is being phased out, but its price did not drop drastically. Indeed, the Nokia 3230 has always been a superior handset on paper, but has always been priced lower.
Keeping Series 60 makes sense because of Nokia's commitment to the N-Gage platform, which is basically Symbian Series 60. There is no point announcing that you are going to have an N-Gage platform then cease to produce compatible handsets.
We're also a little skeptical regarding the implications of the the claim that ARCchart found that most Series 60 applications are not coded natively, but are, in fact, written in Java. We haven't looked properly at the linked 53-page PDF report, but in our experience with Series 60, many applications, even if written in Java, will not run on a non-Series 60 phone; and so the language used is quite irrelevant. There is no guarantee that porting will be easy; if porting was so simple, everything would be written in java anyway, as there are many more handsets which support java than any flavour of Symbian OS.(Caveat: There have been problems with standardizing java support across multiple vendor's handsets.)
In conclusion, Nokia is probably not going to be paying Symbian Ltd. 140 million in licensing fees, up from 55 million last year, but neither is Nokia about to pull out altogether.
[via Symbian Freak]
