After a steady decline for the past few years, Nokia will no longer be launching any new phones with the Symbian operating system, it has confirmed.
The Finnish manufacturer confirmed the end of an era during its Q4 financial report, in which we saw Lumia Windows Phone sales outsell Symbian products by two to one. As it turns out, the last Symbian device to ever be made and sold will be the 808 PureView; Nokia’s experimental 41-megapixel cameraphone.
“During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian. The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid- 2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia,” the company confirmed in its financial report.
Before Microsoft and Windows Phone came along Symbian was Nokia’s most used OS for feature phones, with the software playing a big role in the evolution of mobile phones from feature phone to smartphone.
It’s sad to see the end of an era but it’s not come as a surprise; Nokia sold off its Symbian division a while back and has slowly been reducing the number of Symbian phones sold. We have fond memories of Symbian phones that were ground-breaking at the time, including the QWERTY sliding N97, the N8 with its amazing camera and of course, the N-Gage.
The team that worked on Symbian for many years has been working on a MeeGo-based OS of their own, Sailfish, which they announced not so long ago. As for the PureView camera technology, that’s expected to be included in a new Lumia Windows Phone coming later this year, so it’s not all bad news.