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Symbian may be open source now, but it is more dependent on Nokia than it ever was when the Finnish vendor was its largest shareholder. Sony Ericsson does not plan to make devices running the new release, Symbian^3, and Samsung and LG have also gone cold on the operating system, at least for the time being. This leaves Nokia, always the dominant vendor of Symbian handsets, as the only major backer of the OS.

Sony Ericsson's defection is a surprise. The company has been a loyal supporter, despite its recent conversion to Android at the high end, with the release of its Xperia X10 family. But it has always been deeply involved in the development of Symbian, and has continued to roll out models, such as last fall's Satio big-hitter, and the recently unveiled Vivaz and Vivaz Pro. Now it will back away from the newly open source Symbian, CTO Jan Uddenfeldt told Swedish newspaper NyTeknik.

His comments were confirmed to Bloomberg by spokesperson Aldo Liguori. "We have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system," he said.

The move may be to save R&D costs by focusing on one smartphone platform (flirtations with Windows Mobile have not been too successful and WP7 does not appear to be on the roadmap). It may also be to avoid supporting an OS that is so heavily associated with Nokia, or focusing on the Google OS while it rides the growth curve, while adopting a wait-and-see approach to Symbian. Several OEMs are likely to sit on the fence until they see how far Symbian^3, and particularly its successor Symbian^4 (which promises a more radical user interface redesign), deliver on their promises to leapfrog the current OS leaders.

If Symbian^4 convinces - and after Nokia has done most of the hard work of convincing the market and addressing the inevitable teething problems - we are likely to see Sony Ericsson and the Koreans re-enter the game. If the new-look Symbian fails to take off, they can steer clear with no loss of face or R&D funds, and Nokia would then probably focus its efforts mainly on MeeGo - or even, some observers believe, adopt Windows Phone 7 too. However, Nokia fiercely denied reports that it would adopt WP7, as reported in VentureBeat last week. "As we've stated before, our platforms are Series 40, Symbian and MeeGo," spokesman Joseph Gallo told FierceWireless. "That stance was reinforced strongly by our management during Nokia World, and we have no plans to use other operating systems."

The other main Symbian supporters are Japanese, notably Fujitsu and Sharp, because of NTT DoCoMo's enthusiasm for the OS. The carrier's own Symbian user interface has been contributed to the Symbian Foundation along with Nokia's Series 60.

Samsung had been expected to launch a Symbian^3 phone this year but at the recent IFA consumer electronics show, its head of mobile marketing, YH Lee, told Reuters that the company would concentrate for now on Android and its own platform, Bada. He said Samsung saw some "specialized demand" for Windows Mobile but was "not seeing visible demand for Symbian". He said the company was always ready to release new Symbian products but had none planned for the rest of 2010. Samsung has always taken a lukewarm approach to Symbian and only sells a few million units a year. Although its Symbian devices have been well regarded for their technology, it has fallen down in marketing and post-sales support, especially compared to the huge efforts it is placing behind the Galaxy S Android range.

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