Sony Ericsson Drops Symbian from Smartphone Plans

Despite Nokia’s best efforts to entice developers, the Symbian mobile operating system continues to lose support from users and vendors.

The latest OEM to leave the platform is Sony Ericsson. BusinessWeek quotes Sony Ericsson spokesman Aldo Liguori as saying, “we have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system.”

In terms of sheer numbers, Symbian still has the highest market share worldwide, in large part because of its use on lower-end smartphone/feature phones in Asia and other parts of the world. Symbian’s reign is dwindling all the time and Gartner predicts that by 2014, Google’s Android will be close to overtaking Symbian as the number one smartphone OS.

Sony Ericsson was a longtime proponent of Symbian, using it to power its Vivaz line of phones. Sony Ericsson is also a member of the Symbian Foundation, which is a group Nokia set up in 2008 to allow chipmakers and OEMs to share code with one another.

However, like Motorola and Samsung, Sony has shifted much of its focus to Google’s Android platform. Sony Ericsson released its first Android handset in November of 2009 and is reportedly working on an Android-powered gaming smartphone.

Meanwhile, Nokia, the company that bought Symbian [mashable link] back in 2008, vows to make the platform more open. Symbian’s code finally became open source in February.

Nokia has just launched a new promotion to encourage North American developers to target Symbian. On itsCalling All Innovators website, Nokia is partnering with AT&T to encourage U.S. and Canadian developers to build apps and games for the new Nokia N8 Symbian^3 smartphone. Nokia will be giving out $10 million in cash and marketing to the winning apps and developers.

Of course, the irony is that the N8 is not being sold at a subsidized price on any of the North American carriers. Users and developers can still use the phone by buying an unlocked version directly from Nokia, but the phone doesn’t have the big carrier partnerships like the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry handsets.

Nokia is hoping to use this contest as a way to re-ignite developer interest in the waning platform. While we applaud its efforts, it’s going to be tough to convince already taxed mobile developers to put energy and resources into Symbian, especially when one of the bigger OEMs has no plans to use it in further projects.

[via mashable]

Posted in: Nokia,Sony