tagged with:s60, smartphone
Nokia has announced its intention to purchase the remainder of Symbian Ltd to create a non-profit Symbian foundation aimed at turning the OS into a single open source mobile platform.
Nokia will soon pay €264 million ($412 million at today’s exchange rate) for the remaining 52% of Symbian to become the sole owner.
The new Symbian Alliance will comprise Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG, Samsung, STM icroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone
AT&T is a member of the new foundation, and here’s what AT&T’s Kris Rinne has to say about Symbian:
The Symbian Foundation will reduce fragmentation in the industry and holds the promise of incorporating leading technology and the most mature software into a unified platform for the entire industry. This will create an environment that will encourage and enable developers to build compelling applications that will positively affect our customers’ lives and support AT&T in offering its differentiated services to consumers.
But now with Nokia—the No. 1 phone manufacturer in the world—in the mix, armed with several top-tier partners and an established OS that happens to be one of the best in the business, well … Google’s open source Android platform got its work cut out for it.
Each member of the alliance will get royalty-free access to Symbian (along with UIQ, a smartphone OS owned by Motorola and Sony Ericsson, and DoCoMo’s MOAP) and will make “selected components” of the new, combined OS available as open source at launch, with additional components becoming available over the next two years, Nokia said.
It also sounds like a defensive move against other OS entries into the smartphone areas such as Linux based, RIM, Apple, Microsoft, and others.
This post originates from: N95blog.com
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Original post by ahmed
