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It was hardly heart stopping news to discover Finnish phone maker Nokia had decided to dump its antiquated Symbian operating system for future high-end smartphones in favour of its sleeker, Linux-based MeeGo mobile OS.

The first phones to get the MeeGo treatment will be the new Nokia N-series, with the N8 being the very last of its kind to sport the now nearly defunct Symbian before its shoved over to cheaper Nokia devices.

MeeGo, the love child of an Intel/Nokia partnership fusing Nokia’s Maemo platform with Intel’s Moblin Linux-based software was announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona back in February.

Nokia is desperately hoping that Meego may have some chance of holding its own and even competing against the likes of Google’s Android, or Apple’s iPhone OS, though many still snort at the prospect. Others, meanwhile, admit it’s a step in the right direction and that had Nokia not made this change, it would have found itself sinking further and further into irrelevancy in the smartphone space.
“Nokia, it’s time to do something drastic. It’s time to completely re-evaluate your strategy. A key part of this change of strategy should be the divestiture of your almost total reliance on Symbian,” wrote Analyst Jack Gold last week with rather astute prophesy.

“Business users, the core of the smart phone market, are abandoning the Symbian OS for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. Your reliance on Symbian is unsustainable if you want to turn around your shrinking market share in smart phones,” he continued.

Analyst Rob Enderle agreed, telling RCR today, “hardware and software companies don’t combine well and Symbian is the latest proof of this.  Symbian started dying as soon as the smoke settled on the acquisition.”

Meanwhile, “Meego is driven by Intel who is cell phone vendor independent and comes with substantial hardware support. While still not an assured success by any means – it is still too young – Meego has a lot more going for it and Nokia has to cut down on the number of platforms it supports or get trivialized out of the market,” he said.

That is almost an understatement bearing in mind Nokia recently lowered its estimates for sales, essentially admitting that the critical (and profitable) smart phone market continued to slip from its grasp, despite being an early leader in the space.

Nokia’s strongest presence is in Europe, but even there its market share is shrinking, while the American market continues to almost completely ignore the firm’s smartphone offerings.

To make matters worse, Nokia has sunk a lot of precious time, effort and resources into trying to spruce Symbian up in its ‘yet to be released’ Symbian 3 saga. Symbian 4 is even further out with some estimating a six to nine month timeframe for a worthy upgrade.

Partners are dropping Symbian like a hot potato, choosing to either go with Android or their own OS flavor. Some have even suggested Nokia should adopt Android and customize it with the firm’s own UI, much like Motorola and HTC have already done.

In Gold’s opinion, Nokia needs to already be building an app developer ecosystem around MeeGo, leaning on Intel to help make it a highly competitive mobile platform. “Other vendors, especially in the Far East are now taking the platform seriously enough to make an investment in MeeGo for smart devices,” he noted.

Gold had this direct advice for Nokia: “Nokia, it’s time to cut your losses and move on. If not, you will be relegated to a me-too vendor in the smart phone space where most of the profits lie, and be forced to primarily compete head on in the cutthroat low end consumer device space against the many up and coming vendors from the Far East. That’s not a winning strategy if you want to remain profitably in the top 3 vendors worldwide. Time is of the essence before the market passes you by.”

Looks like Nokia is finally sitting up and paying attention.