The Financial Times has reported that Nokia is expected to stop shipping Symbian smartphones this summer, although it doesn’t expect the company to make a formal announcement.
Nokia chose Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS as its main smartphone platform in 2011 but has committed to providing support for Symbian until 2016. It continued producing Symbian handsets and also uses its Series 40 and Asha platforms for smartphone-type devices.
Financial results from Nokia for the final quarter of 2012 showed it shipped 2.2 million smartphones and 4.4 million Lumia-brand Windows Phone smartphones. However, the first quarter of 2013 saw Windows Phone shipments up to 5.6 million units and Symbian shipments down to 500,000.
Mobile World Congress 2012 saw the last major Symbian device: the Nokia 808 PureView, which has a 41 megapixel image sensor.
It’s believed that over 100 million Symbian devices are currently being used worldwide, potentially making Symbian the third most-popular OS after Android and Apple, but figures from 51degrees.mobi suggest that its global share of mobile web traffic is less than 1%.
[FT.com]