Symbian! It's not dead! Really it isn't! Nokia today sent us a teaser invitation for a Symbian-related event on April 12, where we're asked to "discover what's new with Symbian smartphones."
Here in the U.S., the new thing is the Nokia Astound, a review of which we just published. The Astound shows one possible way forward for Symbian phones: as classy, high-powered alternatives to increasingly unattractive touch-screen feature phones.
But given that Nokia's announcement is timed for European, not American, press - it's in the middle of the night in the States - it's more likely to address how Symbian will continue to be a smartphone player in its European heartland.
Symbian used to be the world's dominant smartphone OS. But after losing support from Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, Symbian lost its last major proponent, Nokia, when the manufacturer announced in February that it was switching to Windows Phone for future smartphones.
Nokia is in a tough situation, though. Because the company won't have any Windows Phones ready for at least several months, and there are hundreds of millions of existing Symbian users outside the U.S., Nokia has committed to upgrading Symbian and releasing new Symbian smartphone models, at least for the next two years.
So we have an OS with a large but declining market share, whose effective owner is trying to advance it while, at the same time, ushering it into a graceful retirement. It will be interesting to see how Nokia plays all sides of this game on April 12.
Perhaps coincidentally, April 12 may be the date of a major Microsoft announcement about Windows Phone 7, at Microsoft's MIX conference in Las Vegas; it's also the date of an HTC product announcement in London. It'll be a busy day, that's for sure.