Samsung drops Symbian

THE PHONE OS Symbian has been given another send-off this week as Samsung cancelled support.

It was only a few days ago that Sony Ericsson waved a not so tearful goodbye to Symbian as it geared up to fully embrace Android on its smartphones. Sony Ericsson was a founding member of the Symbian Foundation so it has diplomatically offered to continue following its development.

Now Samsung has followed Sony Ericsson's lead in dropping plans to use Symbian on its future models. Like Sony Ericsson, Samsung is going to continue to follow Symbian development.

The writing was already on the wall at Samsung. Last year a Samsung VP said the company would be dropping Symbian to concentrate on developing its own Bada mobile OS. Then Samsung reconsidered and said it would support both operating systems. Now it has reversed itself again and confirmed that it will drop Symbian after all.

With the departure of Sony Ericsson and now Samsung, Nokia is practically alone in hanging its hopes on revitalising Symbian with the release of its N8 smartphone.

Symbian has had the lion's share of the mobile OS market in the past but is being squeezed on all sides. It will have to compete with RIM's Blackberry OS 6.0, the Vole's imminent release of Windows Phone 7 and the exponential rise of Android.

Google's open source, Linux based Android OS will probably do the most damage to Symbian market share. The INQUIRER reported last month that Android is expected to overtake Symbian by 2014. µ