Nokia borgs Symbian

THE LAUNCH of the Nokia N97 blanked out this particular bit of info this week: Nokia has hoovered up the remaining bits of Symbian, in its attempt to free Symbian into the open-source development community (sort of).

This move had actually been announced by Nokia in June, this year, but this week the Finns finally completed their acquisition of Symbian.

As of February 1st, 2009, Nokia will borg the Symbian assets and employees, one and all. The company will then proceed to shore up the final pillar in its software strategy: Symbian OS and S60 (developed by Nokia) will be put at the disposal of the Symbian Foundation which will develop and promote development of the next-gen Symbian OS and related apps.

The Symbian Foundation, which was co-founded by ten industry heavyweights (Nokia, Samsung, TI, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, AT&T, NTT DOCOMO, LG and Fujitsu) plans on developing a standard of operating system for mobile devices, with a 2010 timeframe for the next launch.

Apart from Nokia's own contribution Sony-Ericsson and Moto will hand over UIQ, while NTT DOCOMO and Fujitsu will surrender MOAP(S). The stronger components to these OSes will be integrated into Symbian OS in the attempt to create the UberSymbian OS. µ