Nokia To Develop Symbian Platform

[Honest 836]

Nokia to Develop Symbian Platform

Symbian Foundation takes a backseat and turns into a licensing entity

Nokia, along with several big names in mobile industry, had formed a non-profit organization Symbian Foundation to steward the Symbian platform in June 2008. Meant for evangelizing and facilitating the platform, the Symbian Foundation wasn't directly involved in the development of the Symbian platform. But now, After 18 months of formation, Nokia has announced that it will take control of Symbian platform development. The Symbian Foundation will now turn into a licensing body for software and intellectual properties.

Nokia had acquired Symbian in 2008 and had formed the Symbian Foundation to open up the platform's source code. With several other foundation members, Nokia aimed to develop better and future-friendly operating system and make it adaptable widely. Few of the major handset makers and Symbian Foundation members like Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung had announced that it will cease the development of any Symbian based phones.

After that, Nokia was the only mobile phone maker left in the Symbian Foundation and now we'll get to see Nokia actively developing Symbian platform based phones. Nokia's entire smartphone portfolio is Symbian dependent and that's the only platform used in Nokia's most handsets. Nokia announced that it will adopt the Qt framework for the OS development instead of solely relying on the Symbian OS in future versions of Symbian platform.

Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung have been rolling out Google Android based devices recently and hence their fascination of the Android platform is fairly visible.

Let us make it clear that Symbian as a platform is not going to wither. Yes, we will get to see more Symbian devices from Nokia that will have a tighter integration between hardware and the OS. But yeh, you'll see Symbian based devices coming only from Nokia. Yet again, Nokia is left alone with Symbian.

Courtesy : Techtree