Tuesday 1 July 2008

Interesting news on the future of Symbian

In a major re-organisation Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO will unite the various flavours of Symbian - and join with remaining stakeholders AT&T, LG, Samsung, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments to establish the Symbian Foundation.

The aim of the foundation is to extend the appeal of the unified software platform, available for members under a royalty-free licence. To enable the Foundation, Nokia announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian that it does not already own for £209 million and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation., from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

The spectre of Google Android would appear to be hovering over this strategic move by Symbian, which has hitherto commanded a huge market share lead in the OS space. Symbian has shipped in over 200 million phones, across 235 models. This year already, over 20 new mobile phones have been announced. The news came on the day of Symbian’s ten year anniversary (24/06).

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