Nokia reaffirms support for Symbian

Symbian to remain Nokia's business platform for the foreseeable future

Nokia has said that Symbian will remain as its business platform for the foreseeable future, despite widespread pronouncements of the operating system's demise in the media.

Illari Nurmi, Nokia's vice president for business smartphones, told V3.co.uk that there are "plenty of misconceptions" about what is happening with Symbian, and that it will remain "the enterprise platform Nokia uses today and going forward".

Many industry watchers have been quick to interpret the news that the Symbian Foundation is closing its web sites and winding down most of its operations as heralding the platform's death.

However, Nurmi claimed that the past quarter was Nokia's "best ever in terms of smartphone sales", and that the vast majority of those sales were Symbian-based handsets.

The Nokia N8 was the first in a new wave of handsets based on Symbian, Nurmi said, with more coming in the pipeline such as the E7 enterprise device with its 4in screen and slide-out Qwerty keyboard.

Nokia's other platform, Meego, is for "niche products, such as converged devices that are high end and more like a computer", he added, contradicting earlier reports that the Linux-based platform will displace Symbian.

While the Symbian Foundation is ceasing all activities apart from licensing, Nokia will continue development work itself. This is expected to streamline platform development activity, according to Nurmi.

Nokia is also aiming to make use of its technology partnership with Microsoft to push its Symbian-based handsets as the most cost-effective solution for enterprise mobility.

"We are a more cost-effective alternative to RIM, for which enterprises need extra licences and must deploy extra server products," said Nurmi.

Nokia handsets now integrate with Microsoft Exchange out of the box, and there is a Communicator Mobile client for Nokia phones, while Microsoft is developing a version of its mobile Office applications for Nokia's Symbian-based handsets.

However, whether Symbian can thrive as a Nokia-only platform remains to be seen, developer support being a key factor.

Nurmi said that Nokia has now made Symbian more developer-friendly by focusing on Qt as its official developer framework, and that progress with Nokia's Ovi application store has been "phenomenal" at three million downloads a day.