http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1230415

Dropping the licensing fees means cheaper S60 phones (isn't competition great?). I guess we'll see a flood of cheaper S60 phones from Nokia, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung.

What's more interesting is Symbian will get turned over to the Symbian Foundation.

Maemo.org and Symbian Foundation, I wonder who can learn from who.

Don't forget about Qt. Nokia opens things but at the same time tightens its grip on core technologies.

IMO very smart moves and showing there is Grand Idea behind all of that, not some random buying spree.

What now that's news!
I think they'll take slightly different paths, both leading at the same goal.
Make the platforms available to developers for free.

One platform is intended for mobile devices, the other to tablet-like devices.

QT can unify the look and make the switch between the platform easier.

I think this is all good news.

Even more exciting, they're going to make the Symbian platform open source:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/...ays_Open_S.php

They're also going to unify the different versions of Symbian (currently S60, UIQ and MOAP) into one single platform. S60 was favoured by Nokia, UIQ was Sony Ericsson and Moto's baby, while MOAP is heavily used by Japanese manufacturers.

The new single platform will replace all of them with elements from each but mostly from S60 (which makes sense as S60 accounted for the majority of Symbian sales).

Over on All About Symbian we heard a lot of rumours over the past few years that Nokia might dump Symbian for Linux, but this kills those rumours absolutely stone dead, they wouldn't be buying the entire company if they intended to abandon its product.

On the other hand, there's nothing to stop Nokia supporting both Linux AND Symbian, which is what I think they'll do as they seem to be getting a lot out of both.

This is awesome. It's a fresh air that's gonna breathe new life to Symbian.. imagine all those outdated nokia phones (by their standard) that can be cheaply & easily turned into wireless remote cameras, mini servers, and given so many new functionalities with an open platform.

The most exciting part is tha UIQ has been thrown in the mix.

Okay, okay, I'm still a bit holding back until the actual Open Source model of Symbian is revealed, but this is a Good Thing <TM> Nokia did. Yay for them ansoforth...

Seriously, Symbian is a very mature and stable platform and -- dare I say it? -- arguably better than Linux for resource-constrained devices.

But now I want a Pandora with Symbian/UIQ on it. Danggit! can I never have piece of mind?!


PS: It's apparently going to be the Eclipse Public Licence. Meh, it's no GPL, but at least it's not terribly Evil.

Yes, you evidently dare say it.

Ahh.... Poor fellow.No.

Seriously, this is uber-good news.

Here's the San Jose Mercury News report:

Nokia to buy rest of Symbian, free its software

Did anyone notice the numbers involved?

Nokia said today that it is offering to buy the 52 percent of Britain's Symbian that it doesn't already own for about $410 million.

So Nokia is investing/gifting some $800 million for this move. Wow indeed.

So with the intense interest developers are showing in the iPhone and Google's Android progressing steadily, is this a case of throwing all the ballast overboard to keep Symbian afloat?

It would be nice to have a Symbian VM that can run the N-Gage mobile game service.

It seems like a win-win deal for all, especially for Symbian. They must've been shitting in their pants too facing Android, Apple, Blackberry, Garmin and all the Linux variants arming up for battle.