Nokia Quietly Retires Symbian from N-series Smartphones

Nokia announced it will retire Symbian for the popular N series of smartphones. Moving forward, the company will use MeeGo as the default operating system for the N series.

"Going forward, N-series device will be based on MeeGo," Nokia spokesperson Doug Dawson told Reuters.

The commitment to MeeGo means that the last N-series phone to feature Symbian is the N800. MeeGo followers know that version 1.0 supports ARM-based N900 phones, but that development APIs for multitouch support, Web runtime (for the creation of apps based off of web languages) and additional mobile device support for Qt are still works in progress.

MeeGo is a Linux-based open source mobile operating system that merged Intel's work on Moblin and Maemo's work on Maemo. The project was announced last February. Symbian will continue to be used in low-end phones from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The MeeGo handset user experience is supposed to launch in June, according to the official MeeGo website, but unless an announcement is made in the next six days, that doesn't seem likely.