Nokia Comes Clean: Symbian Will Go

    Nokia-N900-MaemoUntil today the Finnish Sisu and some rather big sunk costs has prevented the world biggest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia to admit they have been going down a wrong path already for a while. This wrong path is called Symbian. It seems that Nokia has started to use their own Nokia Maps and turned finally around.

    Ben Smith of TheReallyMobileProject reports that Nokia will let Symbian go in 2012 and focus on Maemo. All high-end N series multimedia devices will be running the Linux OS by 2012, even though X series and E series devices will continue to run Symbian OS. That is, until Nokia will decides Symbian should be banned altogether.

    I hope the Finnish Giant will be on a roll with smart decisions and it will start putting more focus on the developers and especially the startup community that resides in its backyard along with the focus on Maemo. Nokia has been close to invisible in the local startup scene for past few years, but we hope this will change soon and knowing some of the cool cats inside the company, we have faith it will. More than anything the company needs fresh blood and the older guard to understand to step down. The fresh blood is not only needed in respect to talking to the startup community, but to everything that Nokia does. We give massive respect to the team that made Nokia what it is, but now the smart thing is to understand to step down and make sure the next generation will have a tools to kick Droid’s ass. We want nothing as much as see all the cool cats in the scene to buzz about the next Nokia handset and fill up YouTube with videos when they are unpacking it. It would also not hurt if the phone would be a delight to use and develop for.

    It hurts, but just as your economics teacher taught you, you should not calculate sunk cost when planning for future investments. Unfortunately this also applies to mobile phone manufacturers.