On the 10th anniversary of the creation of Symbian Ltd, Nokia has announced that they will be acquiring Symbian Ltd with the aim of opening up the Symbian OS under an Eclipse based license. The mobile operating system market is really getting a shake up at the moment!
The Symbian Foundation has been created to build a new platform for mobile phones based on Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S). The foundation is expected to launch in H1 2009.
The new Symbian Foundation Platform will be made up of a common setup application suites, runtimes, UI framework, middleware, OS, tools and SDK, with Foundation members able to provide differentiated experiences on top. The platform is expected to be released to foundation members in 2009, and eventually open sourced over the following two years.
This obviously makes a huge change in the market place. It wll be interesting to see how Symbian Platform, vs. Android, vs. LiMo, vs. Windows Mobile vs. iPhone.
Of course it is all about developers, developers, developers, and it will be extremely interesting to see where developers will want to go.