Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

I’ve been wondering for a while about what Nokia is going to do with their OS portfolio, and just where they’re going to take it. Symbian is obviously much more stable than most other operating systems out there, and does wonders for the Enterprise-class devices, however it has little “sexiness” to show for the phones that are supposed to be, well, sexy. There are many apps the Ovi Store, but their extent just doesn’t reach that of say Android’s Marketplace. The home screen on Symbian, too, is better suited for the Enterprise.

Of course out comes Maemo 5, bringing lots of sex-appeal to a Nokia operating system, and immediately raising hype in the industry. Much to my disappointment, however, the only phone available with this new, sleek OS doesn’t have the 3G frequency of the cell phone providers in my area. ****! (sorry, a little bitter on this one)

So for a while now I’ve been waiting to see a Nokia cell phone with an operating system other than Symbian, and was kind of hoping it would be Android. For the most part because Windows Mobile didn’t really appeal to me and iPhone OS / WebOS / BlackBerry OS aren’t exactly an option.

Well back to the topic at hand: some information has been leaked and it appears that Nokia will be adopting their Maemo family, starting with Maemo 5 for their N-Series devices. The idea (or rumor at any rate) is to have all N-Series devices run on Maemo by 2012, that is unless the world tears itself apart… I’m actually fairly excited about the switch-over, however I’m not sure which one is better suited for the job: Android or Maemo. And of course, it still stands to see just how stable Maemo 5 turns out to be.

What does this mean for Symbian? Really, nothing. I expect Nokia to continue putting out Symbian S40 basic phones, and S60 on their E-Series. Its the X-Series and the yet-unannounced C-Series that I’m still not sure about, however I’m getting the feeling that X-Series will see Maemo adaptation as well.

Personally, I would like to see Nokia do something similar to HTC and allow users to upgrade their OS as they see fit via ROM files. And in an ideal world a single phone wouldn’t be constrained to a single OS either, but would have the ability to work with Symbian, Maemo, Android, etc. with little effort. (maybe we could even get dual/triple boots going with a shared memory!) But I’m afraid at this point its just wishful thinking, even if there is nothing technological stopping this from happening.

-Nokia FanBoy

via: Engadget (read)
and: my twisted imagination