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Nokia Maemo devices on horizon, but won't dump Symbian
Published: 11 August, 2009
Tags >> Nokia | OS | Symbian
Blame the silly season, but not satisfied with the complex web of contradictions that is the mobile OS market, the Financial Times has hit on another twist - Nokia dumps Symbian and puts its whole high end range onto its preferred Linux platform, Maemo. This was the report from the FT's German edition, citing the usual "sources close to the company" - and likely sparked by the sighting of upcoming Maemo devices, which look closer to the N Series than the existing Linux tablets.
Admittedly, spending $410m to acquire full control of Symbian, then effectively giving away all the license revenues by putting it into open source, and then dropping it before the first open source release had even hit products, would not be the oddest thing Nokia has ever done (though it would be in the running). But replacing what is, for now at least, the most mature and mobile-functional OS in the world, with a largely untried platform, might well be - and swapping smartphone OS market share of over 47% (under pressure, yes, but still dominant) for share of virtually nothing, into the bargain. Mobile Linux variants may become the only game in town years ahead, but that is by no means a sure thing, and like Apple, Nokia will be determined to give Symbian its best shot at keeping a significant role, by supporting its development at least for a couple of generations, and pushing it into the mass market (helped by input from the open community, and no license fees).
But Nokia does need Linux too. Like Google with its dual-OS strategy (Chrome and Android), it recognizes that it will have to support a huge range of mobile devices and business models in future, from netbooks to embedded machines. It makes perfect sense to have one OS broadly geared to phones and other resource constrained products - optimized for downloadable apps and voice - and one for the emerging world of browser-based apps and the cloud. So we will see, as Nokia has been promising for over a year, a stronger commitment to the Maemo system, which will be optimized for devices that support that browser/cloud approach - MIDs, tablets, netbooks and so on. This platform will be strengthened further by the appearance of the system being jointly developed with Intel, which will draw on the chip giant's Atom processor and Moblin Linux, plus Maemo and the two firms' existing Linux telephony initiative.
Products running this combination will not see the light of day until at least 2010, and as promised Nokia is announcing new Maemo-based devices as an interim step, targeting stronger impact in the enterprise and the difficult US market. Sighting of these products in the wild has probably sparked the speculation about the future of Symbian, since the N900, also called Nokia Rover or Nokia RX-51, has many features of a smartphone rather than the current Maemo range, the internet tablets. The Rover looks rather like an N97, with slide-out Qwerty keyboard, 3.5-inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, and huge in-built storage of 32Gb, according to many blog reports. It runs Maemo 5, the latest iteration, and comes with many of the N97's features including MicroSDHC card slot, 5-megapixel camera with Nokia's trademark Carl Zeiss optics, GPS, FM transmitter, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
