Nokia earlier announced that it will buy the remaining 52% shares of Symbiona that it currently does not own. The value of this stake is estimated to be around $413 Million.
Nokia will then open up a Symbian Foundation along with several mobile companies and telcos (AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, DoCoMo, Samsung, SonyEricsson, ST Micro, TI, and Vodafone) and hand over the Symbian OS and the S60 interface.
Motorola and Sony Ericsson will also contribute the UIQ to the foundation.
What does this mean? The OS and the S60 UI will become open source and anyone can practically use them on their phones once it comes out into the public. Symbian OS will be come a major player in the mobile open source arena along with LiMo and Google’s Android.
Who will be affected with this? Mostly Microsoft who’s the only major player in the mobile market that charges for its OS — Windows Mobile. It will certainly hurt them a lot. Apple is not selling licenses for the iPhone OS, so they’re on a different plain.
When will this take effect? Nokia says development may take around 2 years so there’s plenty of room for Android to play catch.
Read the full Nokia press release here.
3 comments
Nice announcement from Nokia. Me also expecting more changes from Symbian OS. I will notice to my friends also through http://blog.techinfoworld.com – an open source information technology site.
yeah microsoft will do the rest… haha check this cool site all about biometrics http://www.hbinfoweb.com