AS GOOGLE'S Android struggles to make it into concrete products, Nokia has probably dealt it a knockout blow by buying Symbian entirely and helping to take the whole Symbian ecosystem open source.

Nokia has enlisted the support of other Symbian investors and supporters to unite all the disparate elements of the handset OS into one single, open platform under the umbrella of the Symbian Foundation.

Sony Ericsson is adding in its UIQ user interface to the Foundation; Nokia is putting in its S60 (Series 60) platform as well as Symbian, and japan's NTT Docomo is providing its MOAP(S) assests.

The most telling sentences from the whole announcement are these. The Foundation "will work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0."

More than that, the whole Foundation platform will be made available royalty-free to anybody who joins the organisation. Quite frankly, the INQ can't see how the Beast of Redmond can charge a licence fee for Windows Mobile after this.

And the other good news is that two of the industry's major phone chip vendors - ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments - are in there as original founders.

So Foundation-friendly chipsets will become available to any handset vendor that wants to follow this particular route.

This move could even take Symbian out of the smartphone sector and maybe even down as far as entry level phones. µ