Nokia will finally stop production of Symbian smartphones this summer as the company migrates over to the Windows Phone platform.
According to The Financial Times, Nokia won’t issue any sort of notice about the final date, as it would still have units in the delivery chain waiting to be sold. The same article says that it took 22 months to get a Symbian phone out of the door; and with Windows Phone, it is less than a year, leaving more time for Nokia engineers and designers to focus on elements of the experience that make a big difference.
Nokia’s Symbian shipments dropped to around half a million units in Q1 2013, which is less than 10% of Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphone shipments (5.6 million). With a total of 61.9 million mobile phones shipped, the company is making a lion’s share of its profits from feature phone sales.
At one point Nokia was a clear leader in smartphone shipments with Symbian holding three quarters of the market. Today, however, we’re looking at a very different picture, one where we have two dominant platforms — iOS and Android — and a number of contenders, including Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Tizen, Ubuntu, Sailfish and Firefox OS.
We gotta note that Symbian is going to history with a splash – the last Symbian-based phone Finns have made is the Nokia 808 PureView, which is still considered the best camera phone in the world… that’s at least a similar Windows Phone-based device is out.