Samsung has notified developers that it will cease support for the Symbian platform, by way of a note on its Mobile Innovator development hub. The site will continue to offer support for Windows Mobile, bada, and Java development.
Samsung is the second major player in as many weeks to publicly distance itself from Symbian — a platform that Nokia recently made open-source after having acquired a majority stake — following Sony Ericsson’s announcement that it had no immediate plans to develop new hardware based around any version of the operating system.
The South Korean manufacturer last released a Symbian-powered device back in July of last year, in the form of the GT-i8910HD — or Omnia HD (pictured) — and even that handset was only running Symbian^1 (a.k.a. Series 60 Fifth Edition).
Nokia is now the sole large-scale maker of Symbian phones, and seems in some ways to be in the same position that Microsoft finds itself in. Both firms find themselves in the unenviable role of propping up a platform with waning popularity (Symbian, Windows Mobile 6), while at the same time betting much of their mobile futures on new platforms that have been largely untested by consumers thus far (Meego, Windows Phone 7).
According the the note on Samsung’s site, the Dev Lab will close on October 29th, followed by the forums on December 30th, and apparently all Symbian-related content will be removed as of 1:00AM on December 31st.
