Big news broke Tuesday when Nokia announced that it will purchase the remaining stock it doesn't own in Symbian and then migrate the solution to an "Open" platform.
"This is a significant milestone in our software strategy" said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia in a statement.
The Finnish communications giant also made a parallel announcement that this acquisition will give birth to the Symbian Foundation-- an initiative intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform, supercharge innovation and accelerate the availability of new services and compelling experiences for consumers and business users around the world.
"Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers," said Kallasvuo.
Nokia will be working together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone on this initiative.
"There has been financial pressure on Nokia to move in this direction at some point. The sheer economics of the number of devices it ships with the OS versus the value it gets out of its historic shareholding clearly indicated that such a `rescue' was inevitable at some point," said ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw.
Mobile devices based on Symbian OS account for 60% of the converged mobile device segment. Symbian OS represented approximately 7% of all mobile device sales in 2007, up from 5% in 2006. To date, more than 200 million Symbian OS based phones have been shipped, over 235 models, from 8 vendors and on more than 250 mobile networks around the world. More than 4 million developers are engaged in producing applications for Symbian devices.
"Ten years ago, Symbian was established by far sighted players to offer an advanced open operating system and software skills to the whole mobile industry", said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian.
"Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet and indeed today Symbian OS leads its market by any measure. Today's announcement is a bold new step to achieve that vision by embracing a complete and proven platform, offered in an open way, designed to stimulate innovation, which is at the heart of everything we do."
Critics say Nokia’s latest move to be ‘open’ was a response to the pressure it was facing from the Linux industry and many are doubtful as to whether the solution will be truly open.
The Foundation is expected to start operating during the first half of 2009, subject to the closing of the acquisition of Symbian Ltd by Nokia. |
