Symbian is officially dead, 808 PureView is the last of its kind
We all knew this was eventually coming, but it's now official. Symbian on Nokia is dead.
Nokia managed to send off the once might platform in style. The 808 PureView will go down in history as the last Symbian device by the Finnish manufacturer.
Nokia announced the news alongside its great Q4 results today, which showed $585 million profit and $10.83 billion in revenue.
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.
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.
Then came the cameraphone era, which gave birth to devices like the Nokia N95, which was widely regarded as the king of the smartphone hill in its day. The Nokia N8 came at a time when Symbian was rapidly sliding into irrelevancy but still made a huge splash among camera-lovers with its large sensor and superb image quality. Heck we loved snapping photos with it and it's still the most popular smartphone in our database with over 25 million hits.
Nokia began a shift towards Windows Phone in the beginning of 2011 and starting now Redmond's mobile OS is Nokia's only smartphone platform.