Struggling to fight the competition vividly imposed by the upcoming Android platform, Nokia and other companies join forces to make Symbian royalty-free for all phone makes. This comes as an answer to ever-expanding Google.
Last month Nokia bought Symbian and offered to buy all shareholders of the mobile phone software maker Symbian. Nokia plans to spend around $410 million on this with the aim to bring Symbian free for anybody and unite leading mobile phone manufactures and chip makers to create this open-source platform.
According to Nokia officials, the Symbian Foundation now has 30 members after adding 3, chip makers Marvell, TIM, and six other companies. To be more precise, the nine new companies which joined the Symbian Foundation are 3, America Movil, TIM, Marvell, Aplix, EB, EMCC Software, Sasken and TietoEnator.
These companies will join AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson, Samsung Electronics and others in this project. This is surely a response to the growing Android ‘threat’ which will be released by Google this year.
Windows Mobile, the leading platform nowadays, may have to suffer from the release of both Symbian and Android as a open-source OS. Microsoft is the only company which demands licence royalties from mobile phone makers.