Nokia's current touchscreen phones are powered by Symbian^1 (S60 5th Edition phones) or Maemo 5 (Nokia N900), but DigiTimes today reported that Michael Hsu, general manager of Nokia Taiwan, says Symbian^4 will arrive in late 2010 or early 2011 while Maemo 6 should arrive in the second half of 2010.
Symbian^4 will offer a Qt cross-platform application development framework, which will also be embedded in Maemo 6. This move will make it easier for third-party developers to publish content and apps to both Symbian and Maemo, subsequently leading to a greater depth of applications available for especially Maemo-based devices.
According to Michael Hsu, Nokia fans won't have to wait until late 2010 to get multi-touch gestures though, as Symbian^3 will be released with such functionality in the third quarter of 2010. As a result of this, Symbian^2 is said to be skipped.
A certain company focuses on one smartphone, one portable media player and one tablet, all with multi-touch gestures, so we guess moving directly to Symbian^3 is an aim to close the gap to iPhone OS more rapidly than first expected. However, as a recent Symbian^4 UI proposal pointed out, while it's pretty easy to come up with a simplified and finger-friendly interface, companies outside the Symbian Foundation may have patents that would prevent a consistent user experience.
Nokia and Apple are for instance currently suing each other for violating various patents. It could end with Nokia being able to provide a more consistent user experience at the end of the day, but that wouldn't automatically help other members of the Symbian Foundation, if required.
Regardless, Nokia late last year promised to focus more on touchscreen phones in 2010, and the company is also planning to release fewer smartphones to ensure that each phone gets more attention.
Nokia recently also announced price cuts throughout its portfolio, meaning that we should see cheaper Nokia smartphones being released in the time ahead. According to Michael Hsu, we should especially expect Symbian models to be priced more competitively.
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