NEW YORK, NY — In a move to make its mobile phones more relevant in a market fragmented by software diversity, Swedish handset manufacturer Nokia Corp. has offered $410 million to buy out its partners in Symbian Ltd. and “open up” the Symbian operating system.Traditionally, Symbian has operated the majority of high-end phones. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile runs a close second. Both OSes have been licensed to handset manufacturers. Recently, however, both the LiMo Foundation and Google have developed mobile OSes that they plan to offer for free. Nokia sees freeing Symbian as a way to ensure the software remains at the top of the mobile heap.
In order to manage the software, Nokia intends to establish a foundation overseen by a consortium of Symbian Ltd.’s former owners: Sony Ericsson, Motorola Inc., NTT DoCoMo, AT&T Inc., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., STMicroelectronics N.V., Texas Instruments Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. A Nokia representative said all of the companies are committed to the idea except Samsung, but Nokia expects Samsung to join the group soon.
The foundation will combine the three primary versions of Symbian into one cohesive, open platform for advanced, data-enabled phones.
The foundation idea addresses a significant concern among handset makers and carriers: They don’t want a single for-profit company to control the mobile operating system like Microsoft controls the market for desktop PCs. More than 90-percent of the world’s desktop PCs run on one of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, but the mobile phone market is fragmented into about a dozen competing platforms. Of those, Symbian has garnered about 60-percent of the worldwide smart-phone market.
The U.S. market has been the slowest to adopt the Symbian OS. U.S. cell phones are dominated by Research in Motion Ltd.’s Blackberry, Palm Inc. and Windows Mobile. Apple has gained a significant foothold with its iPhone.
Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker and previously the owner of 48-percent of Symbian Ltd., is banking on increased adoption of the free Symbian OS to offset the foundation’s development costs. As a gesture of goodwill, technology companies often donate the fruits of their research to non-profit foundations that distribute free software.
Nokia’s acquisition of Symbian and subsequent foundation-building is expected to be complete by the fourth quarter of 2008 and is subject to regulatory approval.
