The Short Names

When Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced a new smartphone, the N900, powered by its Maemo Linux variant, this summer, it seemed to be dipping its toe in to the water of an entirely new firmware future.

Nokia’s much-hyped 5800 and N97 showed that Symbian is now ill-suited to running a sophisticated, modern and easy-to-use multimedia phone, so maybe Maemo lights the way…

Now The Really Mobile Project reports that Maemo marketing managers told a London N900 gathering Nokia will “drop Symbian from the entire ‘top end’ N-Series range of handsets in favour of Maemo by 2012”.

But hold your horses. Nokia tells mocoNews.net: “Basically, Nokia has multiple platforms to serve different purposes and address different markets. Symbian is still our smartphone OS of choice and Maemo continues to be our choice for our handheld internet devices.

“We have announced some great products on both platforms lately with the Nokia N900 (Maemo), Nokia X6 and the Nokia N97 mini (Symbian). Symbian has been more successful than ever in bringing smartphones to the mass market. Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you’d typically find inside a desktop computer which delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address as a company.

“I suppose there could have been a slight misunderstanding in the ‘N’ device terms as we run Symbian OS in our other Nseries devices such as N97.”

Indeed, the key word in Really Mobile Project’s report is “top-end Nseries range” – of which there is only one so far; the N900 itself…

What’s more likely is Nokia adds more Maemo-powered handsets like the N900, which it’s called a “tablet”, to an extended top-tier Nseries lineup, while retaining Symbian S60 for its mid-range multimedia smartphones and S40 for basic candybars and emerging-market devices.

Incidentally, I used an N900 recently, and “tablet” is a significant overstatement. Though the device follows in the N810 and N800 footsteps, it packs a slideout keyboard, looks remarkably like the N97 and much of the interface is reminiscent of Nokia’s existing system.

But none of this is to suggest that Nokia shouldn’t cut Symbian adrift. S60’s recent 5th edition has been an awkward upgrade for new touchscreen devices, making Nokia’s rather decent hardware look poor; compared with modern rivals (don’t make me say “iPhone”), it now feels like a clumsy and overly complicated UI.

Nokia must now hope the Symbian Foundation can get developers to innovate around a somewhat open-sourced OS sufficiently to reinvent the software from its base. But it should keep an option on Maemo as it waits for the incumbent to catch up.

Related

• Nokia Launches the N97 To Keep Up With The Internet; Google vs Apple vs Nokia Heats Up
• Nokia’s First Touchscreen: It’s No iPhone, It’s More Sociable