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"Nokia has announced a cash offer to acquire all the shares of Symbian Limited it does not already own (52%) at a price of 3.647 euros per share, which means that Nokia will spend approximately 264 million euros on the acquisition. \nNokia has always been the biggest supporter of the Symbian platform, and all of their smartphones use some flavor of the Symbian OS, but it's not alone: other companies, such as Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, are also using Symbian for some of their devices. Therefore, Nokia decided to turn the intellectual property of Symbian over to the Symbian Foundation, which pretty much means that Symbian is now an alliance similar to Google's Open Handset Alliance. Members of Symbian Foundation are Nokia, AT&amp;T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.\n\n\"Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers,\" said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia.\nHe's right about Symbian being the leading open platform for mobile devices, but I'm not sure about it being the most attractive platform. I've heard many a Java programmer cry over the many iterations of the Symbian OS - S60, S80, UIQ 1,2,3 and their variations - iPhone, on the other hand, is only one device, which makes the application development process a much simpler affair. The upcoming Android is, well, upcoming, so we'll have to wait see how it will fare compared to Symbian and the iPhone OS; so far, I've heard a significant amount of negative comments from developers.  Kallasvuo addresses the issues in his statement. \"We will drive efficient, open innovation by unifying the platform and simplifying the software supply chain, leveraging our experience from mobile devices.\", he said. Do it, and hurry, because although Symbian OS currently leads the market, I doubt things will stay that way for long if things don't change."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/06/23/nokia-acquires-symbian/>