Nokia has confirmed in its Q4 financial results that the 808 PureView smartphone will be the last Symbian device it will ever produce.
This morning, Nokia reported operating profits for the first time in six quarters of €439m on revenues of €8.04bn and chimed that its strategy to turn its fortunes around is working.
An essential part of that turnaround strategy has been an alliance with Microsoft to produce smartphones based on the Windows Phone operating system.
That strategy is paying dividends, with more than 4m Lumia devices shipped during the busy Christmas sales season.
The casualty of this strategy, however, is Nokia’s longstanding use of the Symbian operating system.
In its results today, Nokia confirmed the last device that will use the Symbian software is the existing 808 PureView.
Buried deep in the financial results on page 36 (and spotted first by TechCrunch) was a paragraph that read: “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 story of Symbian
Symbian was an operating system that descended from personal digital assistant maker Psion. It evolved into its own organisation in 1998 when Symbian Ltd was founded as a joint venture between Nokia, Ericsson and Microsoft.
Nokia took over the Symbian Foundation in 2010. However, in February 2011, as the mobile device landscape began to alter significantly, Nokia announced a deal with Microsoft that would see it adopt Windows Phone as its primary platform.
A deal with Accenture saw 2,800 Nokia employees join Accenture as the consultancy player took over Symbian software development and support.
The 808 PureView picked up the Best New Mobile Handset Award at the Mobile World Congress in 2012. The device created quite a stir at the time because it came with a 41-megapixel camera lens from Carl Zeiss, as well as NFC capabilities.
