AT&T to ditch WinMo over Symbian, iPhone may stay

It turns out that these days WinMo is not in its best shape. AT&T have just announced their plans to limit the smartphones in their portfolio to only one OS. They`ll have to choose one of the now existing platforms and according to them the most promising one seems to be Symbian.

All this comes after a Gartner market research yesterday confirmed that in Q3 2008 Apple have sold more devices than WinMo`s total on a global scale.

One of the major US carriers, AT&T came to the decision of focusing on only one smartphone platform hoping that it will minimize all the efforts (read costs) of supporting all the various systems that their customers use. In other words - fewer platforms, fewer problems.

The winning OS should be an open platform allowing much more developers to create applications for the smartphones sold by AT&T. And as AT&T's Roger Smith puts it - Symbian is "a very credible and likely candidate". Sorry, Windows Mobile!

As iPhone is supported by Apple themselves, it will stay in the AT&T portfolio despite the new changes. All is not lost of course for WinMo, as AT&T aims to restructure their portfolio within a rather stretched deadline of 2014. Go, WinMo 7, go!

Source