14 DAY TRIAL // Symbian Foundation has just announced that it will become a much smaller legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property issues for the Symbian trademark. The decision follows suspicions about the platform's problems and possible closing of the Foundation.
On the other hand, Nokia stated that it will continue to support the development of the platform “via an alternative direct and open model”, which means that Symbian will continue to function as an operating system, but will be distributed under another “yet-to-be-defined” way exclusively by Nokia.
“Nokia remains committed to Symbian as the most used smartphone platform around the world,” said Jo Harlow, senior vice president, Smartphones, Nokia.
“The Nokia N8 generated the highest online pre-orders we’ve ever experienced and we have a family of Symbian^3 smartphones including the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, and Nokia C6-01 which are available now, as well as the Nokia E7 which is expected to ship before the end of 2010. Nokia expects to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 smartphones,” continued Harlow.
Apparently, the foundation will reduce its operations, as well as staff, which counts 100 employees currently. Furthermore, the Symbian Foundation will be led by a group of non-executive directors tasked with “overseeing the organisation's licensing function”, by April 2011.
“The founding board members took a bold strategic step in setting up the foundation, which was absolutely the right decision at the time,” says Tim Holbrow, executive director, Symbian Foundation.
“There has since been a seismic change in the mobile market but also more generally in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members. The result of this is that the current governance structure for the Symbian platform – the foundation - is no longer appropriate,” added Holbrow.
The announcement precedes Symbian’s annual developer conference, but the officials stated that this will not affect the event, which will commence on November 9th in Amsterdam.