Symbian Phone Software Now Free
Symbian Foundation has recently announced that its flagship platform – Symbian is available for free for public use starting today – February 4th, 2010.
Nokia has been driving the Symbian Foundation efforts since 2008 and is the biggest maker of phones running on Symbian platform. A large number of other phone manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson) and an equally impressive list of carriers (AT&T, NTT DoCoMo and others) have joined hands with Nokia in efforts to promote Symbian’s growth. Lee Williams, the Executive Direction of Symbian Foundation mentions that they have successfully completed the largest ever conversion of proprietary software to ‘Open Source’ and the source code of Symbian is now available for anyone to use.
This is a massive move by Nokia considering that Symbian is used on nearly 330 million phones all over the world. The open source Symbian is known as “Symbian 3″ and supersedes Sybmian Series 60 and Series 40. Nokia has aggressive plans for Symbian and is rumored to be preparing to launch its first phone based on Symbian 3 OS in 3rd quarter of 2010. Symbian 4 might be available by end of this year and Nokia might well launch phones based on Symbian 4 in early 2011.
Android is already open source and free. With Symbian now joining the open source gang, mobile operating systems are certainly heading in the right direction. I wonder how the folks at Apple would respond to this move from Nokia? It’s high time that we see a Symbian counterpart to take on the likes of Google Nexus One and Apple iPhone.
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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter,Identi.ca, or Friendfeed
