Whill Nokia dump Symbian?

ARCchart has published an article asking: Will Nokia dump Symbian? in which they conclude that this would make sense since Symbian has proven problematic when ported to new hardware platforms. The good people ar ARCchart seem tohave missed one additional issue Nokia's facing, namely a dwindling profit margen. Businessweek reports of Nokia's problem maintaining high average sales prices.

A reason why the average sales prices of Nokia's devices is dropping is the fact that a large part of the growth in the handset market is coming from developing countries. The Economist wrote (subscription) that the biggest source of unit sales growth will be the developing world but at the same time warns that the handset makers won't be able to demand the prices they are used to in the developed world, especially since the local operators are not subsidizing handsets. In the same article the Economist suggests that the handset maker best qualified to thrive in this high volume, low profit market is Nokia. Nokia produces more components of its mobile phones itself than any of the other handset makers. A noteable exception to this advantage is the OS, which in high end phones is licensed from Symbian.

It would seem logical fo Nokia to bring its OS development inhouse and to tailor a 'master' OS for different classes of handset. In this manner, Nokia could achieve even greater volumes in compoents. They would not have to support different hardware platforms for different OSes for different markets. Furthermore, Nokia could speed up its development cycle by removing possible waits due to a lagging OS. All in all, I think that an OS migration by Nokia makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't be too surprised if the development of the Nokia 770 tablet running Linux turns out to be a precursor to new Nokia Linux based phones in Q1 or Q2 2006.