Huge News: Nokia Acquires Symbian
Nokia Answers Back
A compelling reason I enjoy Nokia smart phones is their use of the Symbian operating system. This mobile OS is found on many phones including Nokia, Sony Ericcson, Panasonic, and a few others. Up until now, Symbian has operated as a separate entity that created an environment that was very inviting to mobile phone application developers.
Tonight, in a huge announcement, Nokia has announced that they are acquiring Symbian Limited and are open sourcing the Symbian mobile operating system under a new entity called the Symbian Foundation. Nokia has long been a large stakeholder in Symbian, and announced today they are acquiring all the shares of Symbian Limited it doesn’t already own for approximately 264 million Euros.
According to Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Pallasvuo, Nokia’s intent is to create “the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications”.
Today’s acquisition is undoubtedly an answer to Google’s open source Android operating system, which today was publicized to have been delayed because of issues with telcos.
Application developers will hopefully be able to help Symbian continue its mobile OS dominance as Symbian currently enjoys a favorable market share. Now, app developers will have two major open source operating systems to chose from when developing their mobile offerings.
Note: I’ve posted further analysis in this post.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 11:41 pm and is filed under mobile, nokia, tech news/notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google’s Android | Techno Portal June 24th, 2008 at 1:50 am
[...] Techcraver.com points out, part of this move might be an answer to the delays Google’s Android operating system is [...]