Finnish handset maker Nokia has reaffirmed its commitment to the Symbian operating system and will continue to leverage it for the company’s upcoming smartphones, said the company while referring to an FT report that implied of a possible departure from Symbian, calling it too ‘cumbersome’.

“We remain strongly committed to our current open OS software strategy for cellular devices, which is based on the world-leading Symbian OS,” said Nokia in a statement.

Symbian, used as smartphone OS by companies across the world, has lately faced the wrath of competitors like the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM''s BlackBerry platform.

In a move to beat these competitions, Nokia purchased the remaining shares of Symbian last year to convert it into an open source, royalty free operating system.

According to the FT report that cited unnamed sources close to Nokia, the company has shown increasing interest in its Maemo platform for future smartphones.