It’s the end of an era for Nokia. The Finnish outfit has shipped the last batch of Symbian phones, marking the end of the line for what used to be the world’s top smartphone platform.
We’re not into 21-gun salutes and we won’t get all melancholic and forget our many gripes with Symbian, but we have to pay our respects. There aren’t that many tech lovers who didn’t own a Symbian phone over the last decade or so. Nokia’s first S60 phones rolled out in 2002 and they paved the way for iOS and Android.
Symbian was the first step toward making smartphones sexy rather than geeky. For a while it worked like a charm for Nokia. The company dominated the consumer smartphone market for years, virtually unopposed apart from some niche platforms in the business market, i.e. Blackberry.
Sadly though, Symbian was a blessing and a curse for Nokia. The company stuck with it for way too long and didn’t recognise the threat posed by Apple’s and Google’s platforms until it was too late. Today Nokia makes some great Windows phones, but overall it is dwarfed by the likes of Samsung and Apple.