Symbian to stay alive on Nokia

CORRECT: Nokia To Give Symbian Operating System Update April 12 - WSJ.com: "HELSINKI (Dow Jones)--Finland-based mobile phone giant Nokia Corp. (NOK) said Monday it will give an update on its Symbian smartphone operating system Tuesday in a move intended to reassure clients that it will continue to update the system despite the company's agreement to create a phone using Windows.

"'We will have news on Tuesday so stay tuned,' Nokia spokeswoman Mona Kokkonen told Dow Jones Newswires, without elaborating.

"Markets were spooked by Nokia's Feb. 11 announcement that it will adopt Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform as part of a broad partnership with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). The news prompted worries that Nokia would drop Symbian altogether and that clients would stop buying the smartphones in the meantime. Nokia said at the time that it 'expects to sell about 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.'

"Website Engadget.com reported that Nokia could present its newest Symbian innovations, such as a new interface and web browser."

The future of Symbian is a hard one to call. On the surface it would seem smartphones would mean the death of Symbian. But it is still globally a major Smartphone platform and the longest established OS for higher end phones that presented both web and phone capacity. We anticipate that Android will ultimately overwhelm Symbian, but the OS might make a come back. Web 3.0 is still in early days and though it looks as if Android will be the primary platform there is still a lot of history to be played out over the fate of what will be the primary user computing platform in history.