Nokia to buy out Symbian, open-source code

By Robert Mullins

June 26, 2008 —

A venerable mobile platform will see its ownership change and an open release of its code in hopes of expanding its usefulness.

Mobile device maker Nokia said Tuesday that it is acquiring the 52% of Symbian that it doesn’t already own and is simultaneously creating the Symbian Foundation to open-source the code for the OS, with the goal of having it used as the foundation for converged mobile devices.

A consortium of device makers, including Ericsson, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, owned Symbian; Nokia will buy out its partners for US$411 million. Symbian licenses the Symbian OS, which runs on 66% of the smartphones shipped globally in the 12 months ending in March of this year, according to British research firm Canalys.

Joining Nokia in the launch of the Symbian Foundation will be LG Electronics, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, along with wireless carriers, including AT&T, NTT DoCoMo and others.

To ante up, Nokia will contribute Symbian OS and its S60 smartphone platform; Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contribute their Symbian-based UIQ graphical user interface layer; and NTT DoCoMo will contribute its MOAP(S) mobile platform.

Under the new regime, Symbian is expected to be released under the open-source Eclipse Public License within the next two years, which Ian Skerrett, marketing director of the Eclipse Foundation, considers “a great endorsement” of the license.

A number of development tools for mobile applications are based on Eclipse, Skerrett noted, such as the embedded rich client platform project, which runs on top of the Symbian operating system.

Releasing Symbian under an Eclipse license, Skerrett added, “will offer interesting synergies between the Symbian operating system and the tooling environment.

“Having developers write things for your operating system is very important … and there is a great synergy potential for having really strong tools and the OS all under one license.”

The takeover announcement coincided with Symbian’s 10th birthday, said Jorgen Behrens, executive vice president of Symbian, on a conference call with reporters. Cumulatively, 200 million mobile devices sold worldwide run the Symbian OS, he noted, and half of those sales have occurred in just the last two years, evidence he cited of Symbian’s momentum.

Open-sourcing the operating system should serve as another catalyst for growth, Behrens added. “This is a natural and bold step for the industry.”

An open-source Symbian platform could pose competition for Google’s Android platform, which Google executives have said could hit the market sometime in the second half of 2008. But on June 23, The Wall Street Journal reported that some wireless carriers do not expect any Android devices until early 2009, citing delays in getting specifics of the open-source platform from Google.

Third-party software developers and wireless carriers also stated that a lot of work lies ahead before Android-based devices can be available, the Journal noted.

But Google stands by its forecast. "We remain on schedule to deliver the first Android-based handset in the second half of 2008 and we're very excited to see the momentum continuing to build behind the Android platform among carriers, handset manufacturers, developers and consumers," a spokesperson told SD Times by e-mail.

Nokia’s move could also advance opportunities for Symbian in the U.S. Although Symbian’s global share is two-thirds of the smartphone OS market, Canalys research also shows that its U.S. market share in the first quarter of 2008 was little more than 1%. The dominant OS providers in the U.S. are RIM, with 43%, Microsoft, with 25%, and Apple, with 20%.

By 2010, the foundation expects that four billion people worldwide will own converged mobile devices, Symbian’s target market. As generally understood, such devices combine a phone with a camera, music player, browser or other features, and for many, that would be their first Internet-connected device.

Membership in the Symbian Foundation will be open to anyone willing to pay the $1,500 annual dues. The Foundation should begin operation in early 2009 after completion of the acquisition by Nokia, which is expected in the fourth quarter of this year.

Related Search Term(s): Mobile development, Nokia, Symbian

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