Today Nokia has announced the acquisition of Symbian. Nokia has also created the Symbian foundation that will provide a royalty free license to its members. Carriers Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo and AT&T, as well as Samsung and LG Electronics are becoming members.
Symbian is the operating system in the Nokia S60 smartphones and in some Sony Erricsson and Samsung devices, just to cite some.
Symbian is currently the world’s dominant smartphone operating system.
The problem with Symbian was that it constituted only the operating system and mobile phone manufacturers had created different UI platforms on top of it. Nokia for example has the S60 platform and Sony Erricsson has the UIQ platform on top of Symbian. The result is that different platforms are not compatible with each other.
The acquisition have the benefit to unite the several different software platforms under a standard platform.In fact, this is the most important message from the Nokia press: “Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform.”
The news in the press: