Symbian's dying. The open source/Symbian Foundation move may have postponed the inevitable by 2-3 years (although it remains to be seen whether anyone apart from Nokia will produce devices with the "exponent" versions) but it doesn't change the fundamental reasons.

It was created over a decade ago when somebody managed to scare Nokia and Ericsson into believing that Microsoft would take over the smartphone OS market. Of course that never happened (Microsoft have failed consistently in anything other than the desktop OS market) and without competition Symbian pretty much rested on their laurels and coasted along with the lion's share of the device market.

Where they failed spectacularly is in attracting developer mindshare. Some of the reasons include an arcane C++ dialect, bad documentation, inconsistent ARM/x86 development environments, build and packaging systems that need to be taken out the back and shot, the "Symbian Signed" debacle and channels to market that grab 50% or more of the sale price.

As a result there are fewer apps available than even on Android. For a platform that's been around for 11 years and at its peak had 78% of the market share that's nothing sort of disastrous.

All IMHO of course.