Sony Ericsson is not going to produce any new products running on the Symbian platform, a Sony Ericsson spokesman confirmed, indicating that the company has clearly shifted its support to Google's Android platform.
"We have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system," Sony Ericsson spokesman Aldo Liguori told Bloomberg. He was confirming comments made by Sony Ericsson CTO Jan Uddenfeldt to Swedish technology newspaper Ny Teknik.
The joint venture is still going to be a member of the Symbian Foundation, which was set up by Nokia (NYSE:NOK) in 2008 to share Symbian's source code. Sony Ericsson uses Symbian in its Vivaz phones, and the company said it does not comment on products that are already in its pipeline. The company uses Android for its Xperia family of phones. The use of Android is "not exclusive, but it will certainly continue to be an important platform for us," Liguori said.
Symbian, still the world's leading smartphone platform, has seen its share of the global smartphone market drop to 41.2 percent of the market in the second quarter compared with 51 percent in the year-ago quarter, according to Gartner. Nokia is still backing the platform, and the company just released new devices running on the Symbian^3 platform.
Interestingly, Nokia shot down a rumor that appeared in VentureBeat that the company might adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform.
"As we've stated before, our platforms are Series 40, Symbian and MeeGo," Nokia spokesman Joseph Gallo told FierceWireless. "That stance was reinforced strongly by our management during Nokia World, and we have no plans to use other operating systems."
For more:
- see this Bloomberg article
- see this VentureBeat article
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