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Feb. 5, 2010

The Symbian Foundation says it is opening its source code to encourage more MID (mobile Internet device) makers to design more devices that incorporate its operating system.

Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of Global Alliances says "opening up the source code also should stimulate Symbian's efforts in North America, a region where the platform has been slower to take off."

He added "making our source code available to the open source community and being more transparent to mobile apps developers is how the Symbian operating system will move forward, and could attract more device makers, including nontraditional handset manufacturers, to choose the platform as they build new wireless products."

The Symbian OS is eleven years old and still leads the mobile operating system market as far as the number of devices using it, with more than 330 million devices running Symbian. But the platform is losing some marketshare and mindshare to OSs from Apple, Google and Research In Motion' Blackberry.

Because of that, Nokia bought out the rest of the Symbian contributors in 2008 and promised to open the platform and formed the Symbian Foundation.

Making the source code available for free could make it more attractive to device makers, especially those in the emerging consumer electronics devices category.

“The mobile apps and OS development community is now empowered to shape the future of the wireless industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result,” said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

“When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we've reached it ahead of schedule,” added Williams.

Berkin added that he is very excited the non-profit managed to open the platform four months ahead of schedule, considering the size of its mandate.

Overall, Symbian's board of directors include top executives from AT&T Mobility, Fujitsu, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm Innovation Center Ltd., Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

It will be interesting to see the reactions of the other major market players in the industry over the next few months.

There's now no more doubt that the key in selling more mobile handsets, smartphones and MIDs is to make available an operating system that is open source and where mobile developers and mobile applications builders can work together in developing a better product.

The fact that device manufacturers can now use an OS for free will allow them to spend more on their own R&D and enable them to offer a better product to its end users.

In the end, everybody wins.

Our hats go off to the Symbian Foundation.

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Source: The Symbian Foundation.