Nokia might be on its way to kicking Symbian out of the house: the company may drop its well-worn smartphone operating system for the open-source Maemo, which it plans to deploy in Internet tablets.

The German edition of the Financial Times quotes a source "close to Nokia" saying, "Symbian is much too cumbersome to keep up with modern operating systems. We have to react."

We noted in our recent review of the Nokia Surge that the Symbian operating system is aging. When compared with cutting-edge webOS, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android OSs, Symbian has a hard time keeping up. Maybe Nokia just doesn't think Symbian has what it takes to get them to the future.

At this point it's all still speculative. Nokia completed its $410 million acquisition of Symbian just four months ago (it was announced in July 2008). That's a lot cash for something you're going to just dump anyway.

To throw more charcoal onto the rumor fire, Microsoft and Nokia have scheduled a press conference tomorrow to announce a plan to bring Microsoft Office compatibility to more phones, according to CNET. One may wonder if the two companies are strengthening ties so Microsoft can deploy Windows on some of Nokia's phones.

[Via Mirror.co.uk, Financial Times Deutschland, and CNET]