Nokia to buy out Symbian shares

Nokia today announced that it is in the process of buying all the shares in Symbian, the creators of the infamous Nokia operating system, for an estimated 260 million Euros.

The sale of the residual 52% shares in Symbian, the original smartphone operating system vendor, has already been agreed by the shareholders and upon completion, will immediately be transformed into the Symbian Foundation, a not-for-profit, open development platform,  which could have significant ramifications for the mobile internet industry.

"Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia. "Nokia is a strong supporter of open platforms and technologies as they give the freedom to build, maintain and evolve applications and services across device segments and offer by far the largest ecosystem, enabling rapid innovation. Today’s announcement is a major milestone in our devices software strategy."

The Symbian Foundation is going to include Japanese mobile internet pioneers, DoCoMo, along with Sony Ericsson and Motorola and looks set to become a direct competitor to Google's mobile platform, Android.

The move increases speculation about the Google platform, which is already late, especially when there are 200 million owners of Symbian mobile phones worldwide.

The announcement comes at a time when some of the biggest internet players like Microsoft and Comscore are buying smaller companies as the corporate world ramps up for mass market mobile internet consumption.

A Nokia spokesmen commented that the Symbian platform will be freely available to mobile operators, which could indicate a more transparent approach to mobile internet provision.