Nokia devices are pretty well known all over the world. While the company has some impressive high-end devices, the Finnish brand is most recognized for their low end 2G mobile phones.
Of course, being the OS of choice for such low end devices is only a mild success for the Symbian Foundation. When it comes to high end smart phones, most people would rather go after other devices such as Android mobile phones. Many believe that the Symbian’s long history with basic devices has placed them at a disadvantage when competing for the high end market. And the performances of the systems they have made are not helping either.
After all, it is rather hard to forget how many people were complaining about the performance of the Nokia N97 (which runs on an older Symbian platform). The device would often have slow load times and are reported to crash or freeze often enough to be a nuisance for users.
It also did not help that not long after, the Symbian based Sony Ericsson Satio got pulled off shelves due to firmware issues as well as battery drain problems. The fact that the SE issues were solved by firmware hotfixes shows that the issue was caused by the Symbian OS itself and was not caused by a hardware malfunction.
Still, the Symbian Foundation still has one last card to play: the Symbian^3. And as much as the OS has failed to be impressive in its past incarnations, the all new look of the OS, and its integration of social networking and messaging features might just be the change that the operating system needs.
The Symbian^3 mobile platform will be making its debut with the upcoming HDMI capable Nokia N8 smart phone that is due to be released in the next few months.
Tags: Nokia, Symbian, Symbian-3, Symbian-Foundation