Nokia (NOK) announced today that it will offer to purchase the remaining 52% of Symbian (it already owns 48%) for $410 million.
Nokia is also joining AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson (to name a few) to form a non-profit Symbian Foundation for mobile app development. The foundation’s goal is to single platform that will go open-source in the next few years.
The mobile app world has gone consortium-crazy, and it’s become quite clear that open source is the way to go: Nokia’s open source platform will compete against Apple’s recently announced platform for the next generation of iPhones and Google’s Android platform.
This can only mean good things for application developers—using a single platform makes it easier and faster for them to bring their apps to market.
GigaOM quotes BusinessWeek columnist Stephen Wildstorm, who seems to have the best opinion on the state of the mobile industry now: “Yes, good hardware design is critical. But in the end, it’s the software that really makes the difference.”
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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