Nokia are reportedly to stop shipments of its Symbian phones for the rest of the year, two years after the Finnish manufacturer adopted Windows Phone as its operating system.
Symbian usage has been dropping off. In the first quarter of 2013, Nokia sold just 500,000 handsets running the operating system and the last Symbian to be launched was in mid-2012 – the 808 PureView.
Sources have told the Financial Times the long development time of the devices is one of the reasons to halt their production.
According to the manufacturer it takes 22 months to bring a Symbian product to the market, compared to less than a year for a Windows Phone handset.
Nokia have however not confirmed Symbian’s exit point themselves.
“We can’t confirm when Symbian shipments come to an end, unfortunately,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD.
“In general, though, regarding Symbian, the last Symbian phone we introduced was the Nokia 808 PureView, and that’s fitting. This phone extended the platform’s pioneering tradition, and acted as a bridge for the next wave of innovation now seen in our latest models, like the Lumia 925.”
