Nokia to drive Symbian open platform

According to the Foundation, its aim is to unify the Symbian world. As part of the arrangement, Nokia is to spend more than £200million to buy the shares in Symbian which it doesn’t own. Once this is accomplished, it will contribute the Symbian OS and S60 to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contributing UIQ, whilst DoCoMo is contributing MOAP(S). From these contributions, the Foundation will create a unified platform with a common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty free license. ”Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s ceo, pictured. “Nokia is a strong supporter of open platforms and technologies as they give the freedom to build, maintain and evolve applications and services across device segments and offer by far the largest ecosystem, enabling rapid innovation. Today’s announcement is a major milestone in our devices software strategy.” Symbian ceo Nigel Clifford noted: “Ten years ago, Symbian was established to offer an advanced open operating system and software skills to the whole mobile industry. Today’s announcement is a bold step to achieve that vision by embracing a complete and proven platform, offered in an open way, designed to stimulate innovation which is at the heart of everything we do.”