In case you didn’t hear about it earlier today - Nokia announced plans to acquire the remaining 52 percent of Symbian Limited, makers of the popular Symbian OS, for approximately EUR 264 million. In turn, Nokia will turn around and team up with several companies to create the Symbian Foundation - an effort to unify the Symbian mobile platform and “set it free”. That’s the right - the Foundation’s charter is to unify Symbian, S60, UIQ, and MOAP software and then provide a royalty-free open platform. Other companies in the Foundation include AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics. Texas Instruments, and Vodafone.

While Symbian is the most widely used mobile phone OS, it’s very clear that the competition is gaining on them. It’s increasingly evident that companies are positioning themselves to be the platform provider of choice. Just look at Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, Apple’s OS X for the iPhone, and Google’s Android platform. Each of these three competing platforms take different routes to delivering software to their respective hardware platforms. Both Microsoft and Apple are going their traditional routes with Microsoft licensing their OS to hardware manufacturers and Apple controlling both the hardware and software specifications for a relatively closed yet powerful platform and experience. Google hopes to gain market share by making their platform open and free to use (with money coming in from potential ad revenue). To combat these approaches, Nokia and the other companies had to do something - and that something was the founding of the Symbian Foundation.

According to the Foundation’s website, these companies are “coming together .. to bring to life a shared vision and to create the most proven, open and complete mobile software platform - available for free.” Membership within the foundation will be open to all organizations for an annual fee of $1500. The resulting Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty free license. The platform itself will go open source in the next two years and will use the Eclipse Pubic License. The platform code will be available to all for free.

Of course - no one knows how all of this will pan out in the long haul. Will all the companies in the foundation be able to work well together? How will competing interests within each handset manufacturer play out in the OS world? One thing is for sure - things are getting more and more interesting in the mobile front.

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Technorati Tags: Nokia, Symbian Limited, Symbian Foundation