Samsung axes Symbian support, Nokia closer to death

Okay, so maybe this won’t exactly lead to the demise of the global giant Nokia, but it certainly isn’t good news that Samsung will no longer support the Symbian operating system.

Symbian is a mobile platform developed in-house by Nokia. Nokia uses it to power all of its smartphones, but also licenses it for other manufacturers to use.

That list of “other manufacturers” is really dwindling down now, though. Earlier this week Sony Ericsson completely stopped using Symbian in its handsets. And today, Samsung, which makes more phones than any other company, also dropped support.

“Registration and certification of Symbian applications for the Samsung Apps store will cease from 08:00am on the 31st of December 2010,” said the company in a statement.

Samsung makes an onslaught of mobile phones spanning dozens of cell phone carriers across the world. But it hasn’t been until recently that it was able to create a killer phone. The Galaxy S series of high-end Samsung devices is gaining a lot of notoriety.

Those phones run on Android, which has become Samsung’s widely preferred mobile platform.

Symbian is becoming more and more completely exclusive to Nokia, a manufacturer that has lost significant ground in the US because it doesn’t support Android. But it remains the #1 phone provider on a global scale because of a firm grasp on developing countries.