It seems that after the hefty $31 million donation, not all is fine at the Symbian camp. The Symbian Foundation recently announced that starting next spring, it will no longer focus on platform development but instead it will license software and other intellectual property. This puts the Symbian platform back into the hands of Nokia, the company who purchased Symbian back in 2008 and set up the Symbian Foundation to aid the development of Symbian. With the Symbian losing support and just getting trumped by their competition lately, things haven’t been smooth sailing. But Nokia still strongly believes in the operating system and is in it all the way until the end. Nokia’s senior vice president of smartphones, Jo Harlow, said the company’s plans have not changed. “Do not confuse the end of the Foundation with the end of the Symbian platform,” she wrote. “The Foundation has been very important in steering the platform through increasingly challenging waters, but the Foundation and the platform are not the same.” With Nokia’s implementation of Qt to make development better and their apps compatible with future versions of their operating system, it looks like Nokia are really commited to making Symbian work. What do you think about the future of Symbian?
