Nokia to favour Maemo for future smartphones? [rumour]

By Kshitij Sobti | Updated on 12-Aug-2009

12-Aug-2009

It appears that that the Financial Times Dutchland have sources telling them that Nokia is set to replace its favourite Symbian OS with Maemo.

Nokia has been suffering from a decline in smartphone sales, and apparently they blame Symbian. According to the article, Nokia believes that Symbain is not as flexible as Maemo and as such is not very suitable for smartphones.

Adding a feature like touchscreen support had taken considerable effort in Symbain, and the operating system’s old architecture has become overly complicated with over 20 million lines of code.

It is difficult to constantly adapt Symbian to the changing smartphone market. To truly compete with Google’s Android based smartphones such as the ones by HTC, or the iPhone and Blackberry phones, Symbain will no longer be adequate.

What does this mean for Symbian? Not much really. For most of the lower-powered devices using Symbian right now, Maemo and Android are in any case unfeasible. Devices using Symbain will continue to come out. What would be interesting though, would be if Maemo could be made capable of running Symbian applications, as that would instantly provide Maemo adopters with a range of applications.

Part of Nokia and Intel’s recent partnership was to develop Maemo and Moblin in a way that they could be compatible, so leading further progress for both operating systems. Mobile devices and computers are slowly nearing towards convergence, Maemo, Moblin and Android for example, are all based on Linux, traditionally a desktop OS, and in the future the operating environments are only bound to get more powerful.

Currently Maemo is barely an after thought for most developers and device manufacturers. To gain some market potential it has to become a feasible development platform, and being based on Linux is sure to help in that. By leveraging an platform based on a flourishing operating systems, they have the potential to open up their devices as a option to all the Linux developer out there (which is a LOT). Combined with the complications when coding for Symbian, this move seems all the more appealing.

But we’d like to see it go one step further! There are already some very smart people who have managed to get Android up and running on Nokia’s N810 Maemo-based Internet tablet. This opens up a lot of possibilities. We could see a lot many more Nokia devices running Android in the future. Nokia would be wise to consider this move, even if this is just a rumour. If this is true, the path to a future with mult-OS mobile phones begins here.