Samsung Commits to Windows Phone 7, Drops Support for Symbian

Samsung made two announcements today. In the first, this company promises to release smartphones running Microsoft Windows Phone 7. The second officially announces the end of Samsung's involvement with the Symbian OS.

According to a statement, the company has made "a long term commitment to including Windows Phone 7 in its smartphone portfolio. Samsung plans to launch several models based on Windows Phone 7 this year in the US, Europe and Asia."

A Samsung smartphone running Microsoft's new operating system is going to be among the first to be released by AT&T, according to an unofficial report. This carrier is allegedly going to be the exclusive U.S. provider of Windows Phone 7-based devices for some time.

The company is supposedly working on at least two smartphones with this new OS, and Microsoft has a fairly stringent set of hardware requirements that will assure all devices with Windows Phone 7 are high-end ones.

A Bad Week for Symbian
Samsung's announcement that it is ending support for Symbian comes just a few days after Sony Ericsson announced that it would not release any more models running this operating system.

Symbian has been struggling for years, and the companies behind it -- most notably Nokia -- are in the midst of trying to reinvent this OS. The first model running the latest version, the Nokia N8 with Symbian^3, just began shipping this week.

In the mean time, it is facing touch competition from Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS. Even Samsung has its own operating system, the bada OS.

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