End Of The Road! Nokia 808 Pureview Was Last Symbian Phone
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 over 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.
[quote]In its fourth quarter and full year 2012 Interim Report (spotted by the eagle eyes at TechCrunch), Nokia states: “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.”[/quote]
The news, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone really, means the transition to Windows Phone is complete from a hardware perspective, although we suspect Nokia still has plenty of Symbian handsets still on shelves around the world for those that want a piece of history.
Symbian OS on Nokia devices has played a key part in the smartphone game over the past ten years, but its significance was severely reduced once the touchscreen revolution started. Some of the most notable phones to come out of Nokia were powered by Symbian – beginning with the 9210 Communicator. The Nokia E61 started a messenger phone hype that peaked with the E71, making Symbian OS the only viable competitor to the then-strong BlackBerry portfolio of messengers.
The 808 PureView, Nokia’s last Symbian device, 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.
Nokia is rumoured, and almost expected, to include PureView technology in a new Windows Phone 8 smartphone out later this year.
We will keep you posted.
