Nokia has taken back control of the Symbian operating system, 18 months after it set up a non-profit foundation to oversee its development.
Nokia said today that it will have no adverse impact on Symbian’s device roadmaps or shipping commitments. Nokia plans to continue to invest its own resources in developing Symbian. Symbian^3 is the latest version of the Symbian platform, with over 250 new features.
The six major smartphone operating systems are Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian/Meego, Microsoft’s Phone 7, RIM’s BlackBerry OS and Palm’s (now Hewlett-Packard’s) WebOS. They run on ARM processors.
About two years Nokia paid 264m euros to buy out the other shareholders in Symbian. The Finnish phone giant then teamed up with others, such as AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to set up the Symbian Foundation to manage and dissemate the open source mobile phone operating system.
The Symbian Foundation isn’t shutting down, but it will change its role to license Symbian software. Nokia will take Symbian platform development back into its fold and make it available “to the ecosystem via an alternative direct and open model.”
The result of the changes, says Nokia, is that the Foundation will reduce headcount in operations and staff and, by April of next year, will be governed by a “group of non-executive directors responsible for licensing the OS.”
Nokia said it expects to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 smartphones and already has some on the market, such as the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, and Nokia C6-01. The Finnish handset maker will meld Qt, its app development framework, with Symbian to improve the struggling OS.
Symbian is still the OS embedded in the majority of the world’s mobile phones, but the OS has lost the backing of most handset makers, leaving Nokia as the only major manufacturer left supporting it.
MeeGo is the new thing. MeeGo is an open source project that was formed when Intel and Nokia merged their respective Linux mobile operating systems to create a unified platform. It combines two earlier Linux efforts, Nokia’s Maemo (which works on ARM processors) and Intel’s Moblin (which works on Intel’s Atom processors). MeeGo can run on both ARM and Atom processors.
