Could Nokia dump Symbian?

Is Nokia going to ditch Symbian and go open source? Nokia's practically synonymous with Symbian (they own 47.9% of the company which oversees the mobile OS and release 70% of the Symbian-powered smartphones each year), but the analysts over at ARC think it's no longer inconceivable that Nokia might dump the OS altogether and port its Series 60 interface to Linux (sort of like how PalmSource is porting the Palm OS to Linux). Their evidence? Nokia's decision to license Microsoft's ActiveSync technology directly — even though Symbian had already cut a deal with Redmond — combined with their recent announcement of the 770, a non-cellphone handheld that runs on Linux instead of Symbian and the potential megabucks they'd save in royalty payments by porting to Linux, has them thinking that it might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. If they do make the switchover there'd be some potentially huge compatibility headaches, but nothing they couldn't get over, especially since a lot of Series 60 apps are written in Java. Oh, and keep in mind that this is all speculation, so far we haven't heard anything concrete from Nokia that would indicate that they're actually going to walk down this road.

[Thanks, Sammy]