Samsung Confirms Plans To Ditch Symbian

In another blow for the Symbian mobile operating system, Samsung has confirmed that it will withdraw support for the Symbian platform and will close its Symbian developer facilities by the end of the year.

The news was revealed in a letter sent out to registered Symbian developers.

Samsung confirmed that it would withdraw support for Symbian on 29 October, and on 30 December it will close the Symbian Forum. It also said that on 31 December, all Symbian content will be removed.

“Registration and certification of Symbian applications for the Samsung Apps store will cease from 08:00am on the 31st of December 2010,” said the letter.

Symbian Responds

Symbian was quick to respond to the development and wished Samsung well for the future.

“Samsung has made some stellar contributions to Symbian and has produced some beautiful phones, not least the i8910HD, which demonstrated the true power of the Symbian^1 platform,” said Symbian in an emailed statement to eWEEK Europe UK. “We’d like to wish Samsung well in its future ventures.”

“From a Symbian perspective, this serves as a good reminder that the open source code is there for anyone to use, whether they be new to Symbian or a device manufacturer that has used the platform previously,” it added.

Symbian also sounded an upbeat view of the future.

“Looking ahead, the evolution of Symbian^3 and forthcoming platform versions continues to both keep us fully occupied and fill us with confidence for the future of the platform,” it said. “The Nokia N8, the first device on the latest version of the Symbian platform, began shipping this week after record online pre-orders for Nokia, and the reception to all of the new S^3 smartphones announced so far has been very positive. Such feedback drives us on as a foundation and as a community to continually improve the Symbian offering and offer the widest resources to our ecosystem.”

Miserable Week

Despite the positive spin, however, there is little doubt that the news has capped a thoroughly miserable week for the Symbian Foundation.

It comes hot on the heels of the announcement that Samsung has signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to launch Windows Phone 7 devices in 2010. This means that the South Korean electronics giant will from now on make handsets that run on its own Bada operating system, Android, and now Windows Phone 7.

And earlier this week Sony Ericsson confirmed that it had no plans for any new Symbian products.

We’re still a member of the Symbian Foundation and follow the development on the platform, but we have no plans for the time being regarding new products on Symbian,” said Sony Ericsson.

Fresh Gartner Attack

Gartner analyst Nick Jones, who previously said that he felt that the Symbian Foundation was just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and was ignoring the Android iceberg ahead, launched a fresh attack on Symbian, saying that the “Symbian open source experiment has failed.”

“The only two top-tier device manufacturers on the Symbian board other than Nokia have deserted it,” he wrote on a blog posting this week.

This development is the latest in a number of setbacks for the open source operating system. Its principle backer, Nokia, has previously publicly stated that it was going to drop Symbian^3 OS from its flagship N range handsets, but later seemed to backtrack on this. Instead Nokia continues to work on the open-source MeeGo operating system in conjunction with chip giant Intel, although it has yet to appear on any Nokia handsets.