Nokia will buy the remaining 52 percent of Symbian for $410m, then open-source its operating system. From the AP:
Nokia will then establish a foundation with handset makers Sony Ericsson and Motorola Inc. and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to make the software available royalty-free. They will combine their three different versions of the Symbian software for advanced, data-enabled phones into one open platform.
AT&T Inc., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., STMicroelectronics N.V., Texas Instruments Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC will also join the foundation, Nokia said.
Nokia said all previous owners of Symbian, except Samsung, have committed themselves to accept the offer and that it expects Samsung to join them shortly.
Perfect news for the aftermath of Google’s Android delay.
I have to say, I originally read this as “Nokia to buy Sybian and open the source” and was thinking that Nokia is certainty diversifying these days.
well, if Nokia buys Sybian the vibrate feature on the phones will be improved.
(oh, Symbian, I always get them mixed up)
@1 Yeah, I read the same thing too, after reading the article I was like “Heyyyyy, wait a minute….”
The AP article doesn’t actually say that they’ll open source it though.