All your Symbian are belong to Nokia

Written on September 4, 2008 – 10:53 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

I genuinely believe there will be a lot of interesting developments in the mobile industry during the next 5 years that will come from a number of innovative startups, but it’s hard not to get equally excited about the power play between the main vendors and mobile OS distributors.

I’m looking forward to the competition between Apple / iPhone / App Store, Google with the massively potential Android (and “Chrome for Mobile”?), Microsoft with its large Windows Mobile market share and its upcoming Skymarket application store, and not to mention Nokia with its huge bet on Symbian.

Nokia announced about two months ago that it intended to fully acquire Symbian for €264 million (or $410 million) and turn the software over to the Symbian Foundation. This is a group of nearly 30 companies including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone that seeks to turn Symbian into a royalty-free mobile software platform focused on converged communications.

The Nokia / Symbian acquisition has now come (almost) full circle with Samsung backing out and selling its stake to the Finnish mobile giant.

And the numbers are looking good for Symbian too: during the second quarter, Symbian launched on 19.6 million devices, up just 5 percent from 18.7 million for the same period the year before. Symbian also reported that it had 92 phone models in development (the highest ever achieved), an increase of 48 percent on the 62 models in development during Q2 2007.

Exciting times, indeed.

I hope you like that post!

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Nokia, Samsung, Symbian, Symbian Foundation

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

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One comment to “All your Symbian are belong to Nokia”

By Mark on Sep 4, 2008

I like that headline, I wonder how many gamers there are left who remember where it came from - perhaps an N-gage port will come along :-)

[Reply]