Nokia confirms Symbian 3 & 4 as well as Maemo 6 for 2010

Richard Goodwin

Nokia has confirmed that it is skipping Symbian 2 and going straight to 3 and that it also plans to release Maemo 6 powered smartphones later this year.

Nokia, who have remained dedicated to Symbian, for what seems like an eternity have confirmed that it is skipping Symbian 2 and moving straight ahead to Symbian 3 in Q3 followed by Symbian 4 later this year.

The Finnish phone giant also confirmed that it will be releasing Maemo 6 powered smartphones in the back-end of 2010.

Digitimes first broke the news after speaking to Michael Hsu, general manager of Nokia in Taiwan, who confirmed both the Symbian 3 & 4 updates and Maemo 6 releases.

According to reports, Symbian 4 is based on a Qt cross platform app development framework that was developed by Trolltech. However, the big news about this new platform is that it will allow developers to create software for both Symbian and Maemo simultaneously.

Analysts have speculated that by 2011 Symbian S60 smartphones will account for 55 per cent of Nokia’s total shipments, with S40 devices coming in around 35 per cent and Maemo at about 10 per cent.

The Maemo 6 devices should be seeing the light of day by the second half of 2010.