Nokia Buys Out Symbian, Making Open-Source Foundation
By Malcolm Owen | No CommentsLeave a Comment
Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 10:03 am

Nokia (They make phones, apparently…) have paid a stupid amount of money (254m Euros, £209m, $410m or 4 Esso Tiger Tokens) for Symbian. They already owned almost half of it already, but they went ahead to get the rest of it. What will they end up doing with the newly bought entity? Why, create an Open Source platform for phones. Where have I heard of that before…

The foundation will bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone in collaboration on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones.

[From BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian]

Open-Source platform? For mobile phones? Supposedly groundbreaking? No matter how you look at it, this looks and smells like an attempt to beat Google’s Android, even if Kai Oistamo (Exec-VP at Nokia) says it isn’t.

OTT comment of the day:

“We’re freeing up innovation – this is epoch-making.”
Nigel Clifford (Symbian)

No it’s not. Interesting? Yes. Epoch-making? Not even close.