Back in November 2010 the Symbian Foundation announced SYMBEOSE, which stands for ‘Symbian: The Embedded Operating System for Europe’, with the goal of making Symbian an OS that could be used across a wide variety of devices and be supported by a large number of chipset vendors, software developers, and even academic institutions. Trouble is Nokia announced back in February of this year that they’re going to ditch Symbian and go with Windows Phone for their primary operating system. Months later they also revoked Symbian’s open source status and announced that they’d be getting rid of their Symbian software developers by sending them off to work at Accenture. Where does that leave SYMBEOSE? It’s dead, and the 22 million Euros of funding the project would have received is instead going to be spent on something else. If this decision surprises any of you … we don’t know what to say really.
Nokia’s got about 150 million Symbian handsets left to ship before they officially stop development on the OS. That would put Symbian’s expiration date somewhere around summer of 2012. We don’t know what’s going to happen to Symbian after Anna ships later this year, but we’re not very confident that it’s going to get a lot of support. Anna, or Symbian^3 PR 2.0 as it was known in a previous life, was first talked about in November of 2010 and yet here we are, less than a week away from June, a full 7 months after Anna was ever brought up, and it’s shown up on exactly 0 devices. No doubt the Symbian^3 devices out now will fully enjoy Anna once it’s released, but such slow development cycles don’t bode well for Betty, Beatrice, Beyoncé, or whatever the next version of Symbian will be called.
In other news, if you’re a hardcore Symbian enthusiast, are you looking forward to Windows Phone or are you going to buy your favorite Symbian device 3 times and keep 2 boxes in your closet?