Articles about phones

. It’s official: the Nokia N8 will be the last N-series phone with the Symbian operating system. Instead, the company will shift over to MeeGo, a love-child OS of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. It’s the end of an era!

Even though Symbian isn’t gone forever (it’ll still pop up in Nokia’s lower-end budget phones) I can’t help but wax nostalgic here. My first Symbian N-series phone was, incidentally, the first N-series phone ever made: the N90. (It was also the subject of my first post on the Nokia Phone Blog) It was gigantic, heavy as hell, and more suited to a brick than any phone I’ve ever owned. But I loved it. And I loved the fact that I could take fantastic pictures (at the time), watch LOST on the flip/swivel screen, and play all kinds of fun games (mostly NES games). The sheer potential of the N90 was revolutionary.
Of course, times have changed, and N-series phones have come and gone, from the first Nokia smartphone slider (N80) to the first DVB-H phone (N92) to the first flip (N75, which probably didn’t live up to standards), all the way to the immensely popular N90. And now the N8, the 12-megapixel shooter orphaned by its own creators.
I see it as a good thing, though. Symbian is a throwback to the past. Touch-screen smartphones have become the de facto standard, and let’s face it: Symbian Fifth Edition didn’t cut it, and it looks like Symbian^3 (which I had to say, looked just like Fifth Ed.) didn’t cut it either. I can’t say I’ve used MeeGo, but early impressions are looking very, very good. And Maemo was, and still is, an excellent operating system. Update: Anssi Vanjoki, the new head of mobile devices at Nokia, has stated that Symbian^3 will not be available on any future Nseries devices – however, a “Symbian^4 Nseries device is a strong possibility.”