When Nokia begins selling its Windows Phone 7 devices, it will have enough competition to worry about without having to face off against the company's own Symbian-based smartphones. So the Finland-based manufacturer, banking on Microsoft's struggling operating system to increase its fading market share, will soon end all sales of devices powered by Symbian -- as well as low-cost feature phones -- in North America.

The announcement by Nokia President Chris Weber in an interview with The Wall Street Journal's technology blog, AllThingsD, comes just under two years since Nokia took over stewardship of the Symbian platform from the nonprofit Symbian Foundation.

Helsinki, We've Got A Problem

The company's share of the global smartphone market dropped from 23.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010 to 16.8 percent for the same quarter this year, according to July numbers from Strategy Analytics.

Competing with skyrocketing operating systems from Google's Android and Apple's iOS, as well as Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, Symbian never gained much traction in the U.S. Nielsen's April survey found Symbian holding only two percent of the market, far behind Android's 36 percent, Apple's 26 percent, BlackBerry's 23 percent, and tied with Hewlett-Packard's webOS.

Nokia and Microsoft inked a $1 billion deal in February to put the software giant's Windows Phone 7, which had a seven percent share in the survey, on millions of Nokia devices.

"When we launch Windows phones, we will essentially be out of the Symbian business, the S40 business, etc.," Weber told AllThingsD. "It will be Windows Phone and the accessories around that. The reality is if we are not successful with Windows Phone, it doesn't matter what we do (elsewhere)."

Analysts say it was clear back in February that Nokia, under the helm of ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop, would put all its proverbial eggs into its American partner's...

2011-08-11 05:30:08