One week after Sony Ericsson's departure from the Symbian OS, Samsung decided to make a similar move: the company will no longer provide support to Symbian, and will instead put the focus on their own Bada, Google's Android and Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 platforms.
In a letter to registered Symbian developers, Samsung officially announced that the Symbian development lab will shut down by the end of October and starting from December 31, the company will end all its support service for the OS. In the future, Samsung's app store will no longer allow registration or certification of Symbian applications.
The termination of support did not come as a surprise as in early September, Samsung has confirmed that they were not looking at Symbian to power future phones because they did not see visible demand for this OS. From now on, the handset vendor will concentrate on Bada and Android instead. In a recent statement, it also revealed plans to introduce several Windows Phone 7 devices this year, highlighting its commitment to Microsoft's revamped software.
In fact, Samsung's decision echoes the announcement made earlier by Sony Ericsson, who said that they have no plans to produce any new Symbian-based devices for the time being. That means Nokia is now the only major phone manufacturer left behind to release Symbian models. The Nokia N8, a high-profile Symbian^3 smartphone that just hit the store at the beginning of this month, has proved the vendor's long-standing support to the beleaguered OS.
Still, this does not conceal Symbian's struggle to claw back smartphone users. According to Gartner's latest study, although Symbian remains the top global mobile OS with 40.1 percent of market share in 2010, it suffered a year-on-year drop of 6.8 percentage point. In the meantime, Android's share boosted from 3.9 percent to 17.7 percent. The research company projects that by 2014, Android will catch up with Symbian.
The loss of vendor support for Symbian will undoubtedly have a negative effect on its market share. It looks like its woes will continue amid tough competition in the next few years.
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