Nokia's open letter spells out Symbian's demise

Windows Phone or bust for developers, company warns

Nokia has published an open letter to the Symbian development community which indicates that the company has no intention of producing handsets based around the platform beyond 2012.

The letter, written by Purnima Kochikar of the company's Forum Nokia community and e-mailed to registered developers this morning, promises that the Symbian platform hasn't been abandoned. "[We] now feel confident we will have a strong portfolio of new products during our transition period - i.e. 2011 and 2012," wrote Kochikar. "These devices will take advantage of the strong integration of devices and services as well as our strength in areas such as imaging and location-based services. They will also include improvements in hardware performance such as gigahertz-plus processing capabilities and faster graphics speeds."

Kochikar also promises updates for current Symbian devices, starting with an update due this summer which brings improved widget support, a newly laid out home screen, a faster web browser, and integration of social media services into the company's Ovi Maps service. This update is expected to roll out to all devices based on Symbian^3, although its not yet clear how much of the new functionality will be made available to older Symbian devices.

Despite what appears on the surface to be rosy news, Kochikar's e-mail contains a dark message for Symbian devs: migrate to Windows Phone or die. "I’ve been asked many times how long we will support Symbian," Kochikar admitted, "and I’m sure for many of you it feels we have been avoiding the question. The truth is, it is very difficult to provide a single answer.

"What I can promise you is that we will not just abandon Symbian users or developers. As a very minimum, we have a legal obligation, varying in length between countries, to support users for a period of time after the last product has been sold. Our intention is that when users come to the end of the natural lifecycle of their Symbian device they will make the change to a Nokia Windows Phone device and so it would not be in our interests to undermine their Nokia smartphone experience."

Reading between the lines, one thing appears clear: Nokia won't be making any more Symbian smartphone handsets after 2012, concentrating instead on Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. While the company's Series 40 platform will continue to find its way into featurephones for developing nations - a market which Kochikar pointed out means that Nokia Java developers can ship their products to around 600 million devices already - its time in the West is pretty much over.

It's a move that Nokia's development community is unlikely to be happy with. Although Kochikar claimed in the letter that the Qt platform is 'the best toolset' for Symbian development, it's a tool that is not going to be supported on future Nokia Windows Phone handsets. Developers who haven't already picked a platform to develop for would be ill-advised to start Qt development on Symbian - meaning Nokia's developer is likely to start migrating to Android, iOS, or Windows Mobile sooner, rather than later. If Nokia doesn't have the hardware out to support this movement, it could well find itself abandoned by the community it has worked so hard to build up over the years.

The full text of Kochikar's open letter can be found over on page two.