Nokia Now Owns the Symbian OS... Temporarily Anyway

Nokia has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited, the company responsible for the development of the Symbian operating system. This is an important step in the process of converting Symbian into an open-source OS.

Nokia now plans to donate this operating system to a new Symbian Foundation, along with the S60 user interface. In addition, Motorola and Sony Ericsson are going to donate their UIQ user interface, and DOCOMO and Fujitsu are going to donate MOAP to this non-profit organization.

The Symbian Foundation will then get to work combining these pieces into a single platform, with the first release expected in 2009. The foundation will work to make the platform available in open source by June 2010.

Lee Williams -- currently the head of the S60 organization in Nokia's Devices business -- has been nominated to be the first Executive Director for the Symbian Foundation.

The Symbian OS is the most widely-used mobile phone platform, and Nokia and its partners are taking this step to make it more competitive against its rivals in the smartphone market, like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

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