This coming Saturday will mark the one year anniversary of the historic day when Stephen Elop, Nokia’s new CEO, got up on a stage in London and announced to the world that both Symbian and Maemo were going to be thrown under the bus, and that the future would be all about Windows Phone. One thing Stephen mentioned during that announcement was that Nokia still has plans to sell 150 million Symbian smartphones. That’s recently changed though. Late last month when Nokia reported their Q4 2011 financial results they said that:
“As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated.”
Now Nokia didn’t quantify what “fewer Symbian devices” actually means. It could be 1 million fewer, it could be 50 million fewer. Here’s where Andrew Orlowski from The Register comes in. He’s been covering the tech industry for more than a decade, and his sources are generally bulletproof. They’re telling him that Nokia’s cancelled all their upcoming Symbian devices except for one, the successor to the Nokia N8. When someone asked Eldar Murtazin if Andrew’s story was accurate, he said yes.
@cod3rror true and again true
— Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) February 5, 2012
Does any of this really sound surprising though? When you think about, Nokia wants to sell Windows Phones, and anything else is just a distraction. Later this month we expect to hear details about Tango, the next version of Microsoft’s mobile OS that runs on device with lower end hardware specifications and supposedly has support for 120 different languages. Sounds like an awesome replacement for Symbian, doesn’t it?
As for this final device in question, something tells us that similar to the Nokia N9, a lot of love will be put into it. It may very well be the last really awesome pure Nokia smartphone. If you’ve been kicking yourself in the ass for not buying the N9, then this camera flagship is right up your ally.