Nokia buys Symbian

Some interesting news from Finland today. Nokia has always been the largest stake holder in London based Symbian Ltd with 48% ownership. Today they bought Siemen’s 8.4% stake of Symbian for $109M and they have already offered to purchase the stake of the remaining shareholders. Everyone except for Samsung has said yes though they do expect Samsung to say yes as well.

Once they control Symbian they plan on reorganizing it to Symbian Foundation and offer one Symbian platform to any handset manufacturer and wireless operator. Any company can join the foundation as a member for $1500 annual fee and their member list is growing and includes Motorola, AT&T, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, etc etc etc….

Symbian Foundation will create one Symbian OS instead of the fragmentation that exist today (S60, UIQ, MOAB). They will also turn it into open source to allow people to contribute to the code.

I don’t doubt that this is a move to keep the platform strong even after Android joins the fight.

More about Symbian Foundation: http://www.symbianfoundation.org/