It’s official: Nokia N8 will be the last Symbian Nseries handset. MeeGo is the future

Yesterday, when hearing about Nokia’s alleged plans to stop using Symbian in its Nseries smartphones, we were a bit skeptical. It turns out that we shouldn’t have been.

Nokia has confirmed to Reuters that the N8 will, indeed, be the last Nseries device to run Symbian. All future Nseries devices (most likely starting with the rumored Nokia N9) will use MeeGo – the new software platform developed by the Finnish company in collaboration with Intel.

Symbian^3, Symbian^4 and future versions will still be used on Xseries, Eseries and some Cseries devices.

In the last few years, Symbian has lost market share to Apple, BlackBerry, and – more recently – Android. Of course, the global smartphone market is growing at fast paces, so there’s room for lots of platforms.

Like Android, MeeGo is based on Linux, and since Nokia bets on it for its upcoming Nseries smartphones (most, if not all of which will be high-end), we should expect it to offer a great user experience.

The first Nokia MeeGo smartphones should be out in late 2010 / early 2011. I hope they won’t disappoint.