Nokia to acquire Symbian and open software platform

Nokia announced it will acquire the remaining shares of mobile software licensing company Symbian Limited--moreover, the handset giant will team with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo to unite the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP technologies and forge a single open mobile software platform. The firms will also collaborate with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to establish the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit initiative dedicated to accelerating the availability of new services and mobile experiences.

Nokia said it will contribute all of its shares in Symbian as well as the Symbian and S60 software to the foundation, with Sony Ericsson and Motorola agreeing to hand over UIQ technology and DoCoMo contributing its MOAP assets--together, these components promise a unified platform with a common UI framework available to all foundation members under a royalty-free license. Additional contributions from Symbian Foundation members will be integrated into the platform as warranted.

The Symbian Foundation is expected to begin operations during the first half of 2009, subject to completion of the Nokia/Symbian acquisition. Financial terms were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reports Nokia will purchase Siemens AG's 8.4 percent stake in Symbian for about $109.4 million, bringing its overall ownership in the software firm to 56.3 percent. According to Nokia, there are currently more than 200 million phones, 235 different models and tens of thousands of third-party mobile applications already based on the Symbian OS. The first devices based on the Symbian Foundation open-source code are expected to arrive in 2010.

For more on the Nokia/Symbian deal:
- read this release [1]

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