With Symbian 3, Nokia has a massive overhaul planned for its smartphone OS. We’ve seen the new look in action, but if you were hoping to get it on your current Nokia Symbian smartphone, you may be out of luck: a senior Nokia exec says it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing any backwards compatibility.
Niklas Savander, executive vice president of services at Nokia, sat down to field questions from Nokia Conversations readers this week after the announcement of the new MeeGo platform with Intel. When asked if Symbian 3 (Or Symbian^3 to be technical) would work on current Symbian S60 5th edition touchscreen phones, such as the Nokia N97 or 5800 XpressMusic, the answer wasn’t positive.
New look Symbian: have your say!
“I actually don’t know the answer but as you know I have history in the R&D of devices and I would say that’s a question of does it make sense technically to create that kind of effort to backport things? I suspect the answer is no.”
Savander went on to say that the potentially more power hungry Symbian 3 might slow performance on older Nokia phones: “You have the performance of the hardware, so is it really nice to have a new thing working really slow on old hardware?…It would not really fulfil anybody’s needs.”
It’s not exactly the most surprising news, since it’s clear Nokia is aiming to turn heads with a swish new look, more powerful Symbian 3, but if you just bought a Nokia N97 mini with aspirations to upgrade it in time, iPhone OS style, you may be out of luck. Hit the video below for the full interview.
Out TBC | £TBC | Nokia (Via Nokia Conversations)
