14 April 2011

Nokia Will Continue To Develop Symbian
And Would Support It At Least Until 2014

Nokia Australia managing director Chris Carr said that company is committed to releasing Symbian-based phones in 2011 and 2012 and said that Nokia will support new Symbian phones on the market for two years after release.

Mr Carr said that Nokia would not be tying itself exclusively to Microsoft, Symbian was far from dead, research and development was progressing, and Nokia was committed to producing Symbian and Windows 7 Phone devices through to 2012.

"There's still a lot of ongoing development with Symbian, the two will co-exist. We've invested a lot of money in Symbian," Mr Carr told reporters in Sydney. "It's not unusual in the industry to have multiple OS strategies."

In what is a massive case of catch-up, Nokia this week announced two new handsets and upgraded version of the Symbian OS, called Anna. Even Symbian's new naming convention -- women's first names and starting with A -- is similar to Android's naming convention of alphabetically named desserts such as froyo, gingerbread and honeycomb.

Mr Carr also said Nokia also would continue to co-develop MeeGo, a cross-device mobile platform OS, in partnership with Intel.

Despite Nokia’s public commitment to medium-term development of Symbian, there are reports in Finland that this development is coming to an end, with the country’s biggest private-sector office-worker union claiming as many as 6000 jobs are at risk by the end of April. That would be equivalent to 38 percent of the Finnish company’s global devices R&D workforce. Nokia declined to comment on the numbers.

Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop said on Feb. 11 that Nokia will adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 as its main smartphone operating system over the next two years, a move triggering “substantial reductions in employment.” As he phases out Nokia’s homegrown Symbian and MeeGo systems, workers haven’t been told who may hang onto their jobs.

“This doesn’t make for very efficient or creative working conditions,” said Kalle Kiili, an engineer in Tampere, a research site that employs 3,000 workers, and represents the YTN union. “This waiting is expensive and we’ve already had a reorganization of R&D in 2009 and another reorganization of Symbian in the second half of 2010, just as the organization was starting to work properly again.”

At 3 billion euros ($4.3 billion), Nokia’s 2010 research budget for devices, which include products ranging from basic handsets to smartphones that can edit documents and show movies, is more than twice Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s entire $1.78 billion R&D budget.