14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia, the giant handset manufacturer, has strengthened its position as a leader in the mobile industry, by announcing it will buy all the shares of Symbian Limited, the company that owns Symbian OS. You might already know that Nokia, for the moment, has 47.9% of Symbian Limited's shares, with the rest being owned by Ericsson (15.6%), the Sony Ericsson joint-venture (13.1%), the Japan-based Panasonic (10.5%), the German-based Siemens (8.4%) and Samsung, the world's second largest handset manufacturer (4.5%).
Today, Nokia declared it would buy all of the shares that it doesn't currently own. By now, all the involved companies have accepted Nokia's offer (of 3.647 Euros per share), except Samsung, which should also confirm the selling of its Symbian shares pretty soon. The whole deal will cost Nokia no less than 264 million Euros (around $409.5 million).
The biggest news, though, is not the full acquisition of Sybian Limited by Nokia, but the announcement of the non-profit Symbian Foundation, which will turn all the Symbian-based operating systems into a single, open source mobile platform. In order to achieve this, Nokia will collaborate with Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics.
After the acquisition of Symbian Ltd. is completed, Nokia and the above-mentioned companies will combine Symbian, S60, UIQ and NTT DoCoMo's MOAP(S) into a unified mobile platform set to become the most comprehensive one ever developed. To quote from the Symbian Foundation website, launched today, the new mobile platform "will be free and open to develop on from the start whether you are enthusiast, web designer, professional developer or service provider." The Symbian Foundation will be delivering its new open source platform starting 2009.
"Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made. Nokia is a strong supporter of open platforms and technologies as they give the freedom to build, maintain and evolve applications and services across device segments and offer by far the largest ecosystem, enabling rapid innovation. Today's announcement is a major milestone in our devices software strategy," declared Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's Chief Executive Officer.
Symbian is, at the moment, the most popular mobile platform in the world. With the news of it going open source, the much-anticipated (and delayed) Android platform that Google is working on might not get the chance to be as successful as is looked in the beginning.
All in all, it's a very good thing that Symbian will turn open source. I wonder what Apple and Microsoft are thinking about this, knowing the fact that their mobile platforms are exactly the opposite of "open".