Its market share is falling and even Nokia has somewhat acknowledged that it's not at the level of its competitors in these high-level phones. When people talk about phones here, we're constantly talking about the 300+ euro phones, not the everyday cheap ones, so whether or not Symbian has a 40% of the overall cell phone market is not that relevant...what's relevant is that Symbian's smartphone market share is shrinking. Symbian is moving to mid-level and low-level devices, Nokia has confirmed this, and Meego will be used for the high-end devices.

So Symbian will probably maintain a huge overall market share if you just look at the overall amount of phones sold, I don't think anybody's denying it. But most of those devices will be the cheap under 100 euro phones in a year or two. And Nokia really, really wants to sell the expensive phones as well, this is not something they want to be doing, selling cheap phones.

Another factor against Symbian's chances is that Android 2.x is apparently going to be Android's low-end hardware OS version next year when Android 3.0 comes out at Christmas time. Having used an Android phone for a year (running 2.1 now) and having seen numerous new Symbian phones, there's simply no competition in the "feel of the OS". If this is what cheap 150 euro Android phones will have next year, Symbian is in big trouble. Forget open source and the anti-google ideas here for a moment and think about a normal consumer that wants something "pretty" with "apps" and "stuff". Symbian ain't pretty, Android is.

So, Symbian might not look like an attractive mid-range OS next year either. And no, the N8 / Symbian 3 won't change much, the OS is not much different at all, the feel of it is exactly the same and the Ovi app selection won't be magically improved, it's falling further behind. Nice camera, though, but well, not impressed.

Anyway, that's why I think people are dismissing Symbian. Looking at what is going on now, it's pretty clear that Symbian will be a "cheap phone" OS pretty soon.

As to the topic of the discussion: I would personally hope that Nokia created a Android line of phones, "Nokia A series" or something, but keep Meego of course, the more OS's the merrier. Saying that Nokia would be under the rule of Google by producing Android phones is kinda ignoring reality: Nokia could put their own Ovi store, maps, etc. on top of Android and refuse the Google apps. I think Nokia has a tendency of making bad software, bad services and pretty nice hardware, so I'd really like them concentrating on making hardware. The services are bad and Nokia's software (think about buggy firmwares, ovi suite etc.) really is pretty terrible. Make hardware. Use the best softtware you can, even if it's not your own. Please.