21 November 2008

Japan's Softbank, Renesas and
Five Others to Join Symbian Camp

Symbian Foundation has managed to make a big impact on the mobile phone industry and all its players and continues to grow at an unstoppable rate!

Japan's third-largest wireless carrier Softbank, Renesas Technology and five others said on Thursday they planned to join the Symbian Foundation to get access to its upcoming, open source and royalty free (for members) mobile phone platform.

Back in June, Nokia announced it would buy out the shares of the other shareholders for a total of $410 million and then make the Symbian royalty-free to other phone makers in response to new rivals.

Since then, 59 companies have said they plan to join the Symbian Foundation, including all major cellphone makers, giving it an edge over Google's Android in a battle over who will dominate the cellphone software market in coming years.

"Competition is a good thing. It drives innovation in the market place and provides more offerings and more capabilities for consumers," Lee Williams, who has been chosen to run the Symbian Foundation, told a news conference in Tokyo.

"We have a mature, proven software platform, shipping hundreds of millions of products globally ... I'm not sure if you can say the same for Google today. They just got started."

Nokia would contribute Symbian's assets to the not-for-profit organisation, the Symbian Foundation, uniting with leading handset makers, network operators and communications chipmakers to create an open-source platform.

Nokia has said it sees the Symbian Foundation as a faster way to bring new products to the markets. Foundation members also avoid having to pay fees to outside software developers.

Nokia expects to release the first unified Symbian Foundation software next year and introduce a completely new platform by June 2010.

Nokia's Symbian acquisition is still pending regulator approvals which Nokia expects by the end of the year.