Nokia buys Samsung's Symbian share

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 4th September 2008
Comments (11) Stumble
Looks like the Symbian Foundation will need to update its chart now that Nokia's share has shot up.

Looks like the Symbian Foundation will need to update its chart now that Nokia's share has shot up.

Nokia has grown ever-closer to outright ownership of the recently open-sourced Symbian mobile platform with the purchase of Samsung's 4.5 percent share.

The deal has come at a cost, however: while the company was originally hoping to spend £215 million acquiring the rights to Symbian this final deal with Samsung has, according to BetaNews, pushed the total spend for purchasing the rights to Symbian to a whopping £230 million. That's a lot of money for something the company is planning to give away.

Nokia's plan is unchanged: along with other members of the Symbian Foundation, it is hoping to make Symbian the royalty-free platform of choice – which has nothing to do with a certain search engine's plans to create something eerily similar.

While genuinely open technology is always a good thing – and I certainly like the way my own Symbian handset works – there is always the risk of fragmenting the marketplace for no good reason. With Google backing the Open Handset Alliance, Nokia bankrolling the Symbian Foundation, and the LiMo Foundation taking care of the Linux side of things it's already looking pretty crowded – and that's just the open-source side of things.

When you're dealing with a proprietary product, it's obvious that you want to keep your competitors in the dark; when your primary product is open-source, however, you have to start wondering how much time and money is being wasted with multiple companies all working in the same direction on disparate products. While it's unlikely that we'll ever see Nokia producing an Android-Linux-Symbian hybrid, it's an interesting vision of the future.

Do you believe that an open-sourced Symbian platform will be successful enough to recoup the money Nokia is spending on its dream, or will we all be using Android 'phones in the future? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote B3CK 4th September 2008, 08:56
So are we going to start to see phones we can choose what os runs on it? So for example, the next smart phone instead of using a hack to open the phone, you can just install the os you want?
Wouldn't that create compition, and by that I mean better for the consumer?
Quote Paradigm Shifter 4th September 2008, 09:52
OS agnostic phones would be great. :D But a support nightmare. ;)
Quote liratheal 4th September 2008, 10:04
Plan B: Google buys Nokia.

Then it's just Androbian and those Linux fans :B
Quote antiHero 4th September 2008, 11:48
Quote:
Originally Posted by liratheal
Plan B: Google buys Nokia.

Then it's just Androbian and those Linux fans :B

Not gone happen! Nokia has way to much money, plus it would be stupid to kill of an open source program
Quote docodine 4th September 2008, 12:57
I only wish that Nokia phone prices weren't so astronomically high here in the states, and that there are more announced Andriod phones. I really don't want to buy an iPhone 3g.
Quote Primoz 4th September 2008, 17:56
Nokia is supposedly quiting the modile phone market in a few years. That being the actual devices. They are supposedly going to concentrate only on software. A shame if you ask me. I've had a symbian phone (6120 c) for about a year now and i love it. I'm not going back to a feature phone, ever.
Quote Gizmo1990 4th September 2008, 21:35
Pahahahaa!! Goggle buy Nokia, that's a good one! How about Nokia buying Google, that's more likely.
Seriously people (usually iphone owners) need to educate themselves more, Nokia is absolutely floating with money. This move is designed to strengthen Nokia's grip on the mobile market, simple really.

And Nokia quitting the mobile market!? Wha wha what? Goodness knows where or who you heard that from but it sounds very false.
Quote r4tch3t 4th September 2008, 23:00
An OS on a phone bah, never needed to, as long as it texts and calls it's fine.
Quote Gareth Halfacree 5th September 2008, 06:40
Quote:
Originally Posted by r4tch3t
An OS on a phone bah, never needed to, as long as it texts and calls it's fine.
Eeerm... And how exactly are you going to make calls and send texts without an operating system?

You do realise that every single 'phone, from the most basic Nokia brick to the iPhone, has an OS - right?
Quote r4tch3t 5th September 2008, 06:43
Yes I do, but they don't have a sophisticated OS, just a basic one. I doubt my phone has something like Symbian on it.
Quote Paradigm Shifter 5th September 2008, 13:07
Quote:
Originally Posted by r4tch3t
Yes I do, but they don't have a sophisticated OS, just a basic one. I doubt my phone has something like Symbian on it.

What make of phone is it?
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