Anyone who likes (or even has a grudging soft spot for) Symbian has been in mourning since Nokia unceremoniously dumped the OS for Windows Phone 7, but this new story that’s doing the rounds might just mollify some of those bad feelings. Well, if it pans out the way I have a feeling it might pan out, anyway.
Y’see, according to Engadget, an exec from the Argentinian branch of Nokia has said on his Twitter feed that the phone giant is planning on making a new Series 40 phone (thus making it, technically, a feature phone), with a 1GHz processor and a capacitive touchscreen. Oh, and it’ll be a screen that uses the same ClearBlack display tech that phones like the Nokia E7 use…
And I find that intriguing, because it implies the soul of Symbian might live on. Yes, the version of Symbian they’re currently using on their smartphones is, in the long run, dead, but let’s not forget that Series 40 is also a variant of Symbian. And there is a touch version of it, already. What really intrigued me, though, is the fact that the exec in question said that this new phone will have some kind of app store, something that’s a mainstay of the smartphone world.
Sooooo, where am I going with this? Maybe they’re making their top-end feature phones be more like smartphones, so maybe people who like Symbian will have another option besides Windows Phone 7.And Nokia can justify it by saying, “No, look, it’s a feature phone, it uses Series 40. See? All our smartphones use Windows Phone 7!”
We shall see, in the fullness of time…
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