Nokia retire Symbian and prefer MeeGo

According to CNet, Nokia will dump Symbian and use MeeGo to compete with Apple iPhone and other smartphones.

Symbian is a smartphone OS, the symbian is back up by few major mobile player include Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Nokia acquired Symbian in year 2008 and release the Symbian OS as an open source platform.

As a user and a developer, I am worried on Nokia strategy. Is just 2 years time, Nokia has change from a strong supporter of Symbian, to abandon Symbian.

MeeGo is a Linux-base OS. It is a join effort of Nokia Maemo and Intel Moblin project. Nokia has explored on Linux since at least 5 years ago (the Nokia Internet Tablet 770). I am in doubt with Nokia Linux strategy too, how long it will last and how well it will be supported.

OpenHand (acquired by Intel), Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo are all Linux-base platform, the application may not be compatible on all these platform. Software developer may know how to port the application from one platform to the other, but as a user how easy I upgrade my mobile device to the later software platform?

May be the Nokia smartphone or internet table platform will became a hacker's only platform.