Rabu, 25 Juni 2008

Nokia on Tuesday purchased the remaining portion of Symbian it did not already own, and announced plans for a mobile open-source development foundation that will include partners like LG, Samsung, and most notably AT&T.

Nokia will acquire the remaining 52 percent of Symbian for about $411 million, a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. Symbian and its employees will become part of Nokia, the company said.

The two companies will then join forces with AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone to launch the Symbian Foundation in the first half of 2009, an organization for developers to create open-source, mobile platforms and applications.

"All of the elements of the foundation and the platform itself will be available royalty-free from the Symbian Foundation" on day one, Mary McDowell, executive vice president and chief development officer for Nokia, said during a conference call with reporters.

The Symbian OS is popular abroad, but has not been widely embraced by U.S. carriers. AT&T has offered the occasional Symbian device like the Nokia N75, but is not regarded as a huge Symbian adopter.

Among the other U.S. carriers, T-Mobile has shunned the platform. Sprint, Verizon, and Alltel are out of luck, as Symbian devices use the GSM network.

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&Ts wireless business, said it was "impossible to say" whether AT&Ts participation in the foundation would lead the carrier to produce more Symbian devices.

"We want an environment that makes it easier for developers to create innovative mobile applications that our customers use, and what were seeing now is that the wireless operating systems are growing increasingly fragmented," Siegel said. "We think it would be helpful for developers to see some reduction in that fragmentation while maintaining an open environment."

Siegel stressed that this "does not mean that Symbian is going to be the only OS we will support."

The Symbian Foundation expects its first release in the first half of 2010, while all of its platform assets will be available as open source over the next two years, said Christie Wyatt, vice president of ecosystem and market development for Motorola.

Wyatt disputed the notion that the Symbian Foundation was coming late to the mobile open-source development game.

"If you look at the assets that will be contributed, youre talking about a platform with 200 million users, over 10 years of mobile development supported by multiple chipset vendors, and operator-ready today," she said.

All these aspects will provide a challenge to new entrants like Googles Open Handset Alliance, Wyatt said. In many ways the Symbian Foundation is ahead of the competition, he said.

Nokia plans to combine its Symbian OS and S60 with the UIQ and MOAPS platforms co-owned by Motorola, Ericsson and DoCoMo to create a completely separate UI framework.

In terms of coordination among members, the "fine details of exactly how the process will work remains to be defined," said Jorgen Behrens, executive vice president for Symbian. "Companies that wish to make contributions that fit in with the foundation architecture will have a lot of weight."

The creation of the Symbian Foundation is evidence that Linux has become a real threat to Symbian, according to Adam Leach, a principal analyst with Ovum.

Leach pointed to the Linux-based Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation, which recently welcomed Verizon as a member.

"The success of LiMo is of particular importance here because the model that Nokia and others have adopted for the Symbian Foundation is essentially the same as that of LiMo," Leach said. "This is an endorsement of LiMos approach and demonstrates that Nokia believes that this is part of its success."

Nonetheless, Leach viewed the move as positive for Symbian. "This is what the Symbian ecosystem needs to push its market penetration to the next level and achieve real momentum beyond Nokias volumes," he said.

ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw agreed that Linux is a major factor in the creation of the foundation.

"Perhaps this is an admission that the pressure from the Linux industry is really forcing Nokia and Symbian to change their game," he said in a statement. "The sheer economics of the number of devices it ships with the OS versus the value it gets out of its historic shareholding clearly indicated that such a `rescue was inevitable at some point."

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