The popular Nokia-maintained mobile operating system, Symbian, now finds itself open after Nokia decided to publish the most recent master source code. In a post on the Symbian website, Nokia says it is "making the latest version of the Symbian platform’s source code available to our platform development partners" and that the Symbian Foundation has been replaced by "an open and direct model from Nokia."
The Symbian operating system was originally created by British company Symbian Ltd and bought by Nokia in 2008 for €264 million, at the time of purchase its major share holders consisted of Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Matsushita and Samsung. In the second quarter of 2010 it was on over 43.5% of new smart phones sold worldwide, the second place went to RIM with a 20% share and in third place was Apple at 14% with the iPhone OS.
The article also mentions the Microsoft-Nokia partnership and states that it is planned for Windows Phone 7 to be the primary operating system on its devices, although the details are still being worked out. In the mean time Finnish company expects to ship at least 150 million Symbian smart phones and will continue to provide software updates and patches to the platform.
Nokia has also announced that they will no longer refer to the system software as Symbian ^3 or Symbian^4, instead it will just remain Symbian with continued platform updates being supplied to both partners and customers.
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