First glimpse: Nokia's Symbian^4 operating system

Symbian sucks and so does MS Phone 7 and the i-Phone too. I want an open system and buy my stuff where 'I' want! Not at the Apple store, not at the Nokia store and not at the MS store. All they want is monopolize content; screw them, I say. I still have an E61i and it still works like crap. Online NEVER worked right, sync with Outlook is a problem; it doesn't sync Outlook's Small Business Folders! Nokia Maps was unusable for a long time. My next phone will be Android driven, period. Not perfect yet, but improving rather quickly, I will have to give it a chance after seeing the new Windows "Phone 7". Microsoft should fire the Pho 7 idiots and NOKIA should cancel Symbian; it's a convoluted mess.

wow, weak....iphone-ish 4 years later by the time these actually launch. Might be better off getting on the Android bandwagon and differentiating in other ways and stop wasting R&D on Symbian...glad I don't own the stock

Bizarre.

While the i-phone is "cool" you have to also remember that it only has 14% of the market (as of 2009) and the symbian has 47%

Not just a cheap, lame attempt at copying the iPhone operating system, but also about half a decade too late.
Why don't these guys just throw in the towel and move to Android or something? They are an embarrassment to software engineering.

Well if you will be stupid enough to dump the platform that accounts for HALF of ALL the smartphones sold WORLDWIDE then you need a brain, nokia is sensible here. Symbian sells more smartphone than iphone, blackberry, android and windows mobile combined. How is that?

I had the E61i as well. It had some flaws indeed, but it was an excellent MESSAGING device. The E71 is a lot faster. One should not judge a brand through one device, though, and I doubt that Google will make you any happier.

Yeah embarrassment to software engineering. These guys are a joke.

You really do not have a clue do you. Symbian is fully open-source. Which means more open than Android. Android are also not Linux it is java based with a linux kernel as bottom.

Nokia have Maemo which are mostly open-source (More than Android) and in my view the best OS out there. It is based on Debian which is great. It will be merged with Intels Mobiln later this year. Together they will make MeeGo. The bad news about that is that it will be RPM and QT. Not Debian.

Wow, a surprisingly high percentage of Apple and Android fanbois here. Humorous reading in the Comments section. Thanks, all.

Meanwhile, Nokia *owns* the international smartphone market with Symbian. Symbian^3 and ^4, with MeeGo for the high end, provide a solid base for potentially maintaining that lead going forward.

Nokia's biggest competitor is not Apple, because Apple limits themselves to a single product unlikely to meet the needs of a majority of buyers. It's not Microsoft, because Microsoft still wants to be paid a per-phone royalty for an applications-free proprietary OS. Rather, it's Android, because the Android ecosystem is broad, diverse, and also unencumbered by licensing hurtles. Android has *momentum*.

Will Nokia's ambitious Symbian / MeeGo / QT initiative provide enough counter-momentum to maintain their dominance of the smartphone market against the rise of Android and Steve Jobs' famed reality distortion field? I have no idea, but I'm happy to see such great competition shaping up for the near future. Meanwhile, I *LOVE* my N900! :-D