Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is Siemens Corruption Trial Begins ...
Tennis: Ancic wins in Miami ... paying 264m euros ($410m; Ј209m) to buy out the other shareholders in handset software firm Symbian.
Nokia, which already owns 48% of the UK-based firm, intends to develop its software to compete with Google's planned Android operating system.
Nokia said Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens had agreed to sell their stakes in Symbian.
It added that Samsung was also expected to accept the offer.
For its part, Symbian said the takeover was "a fundamental step" in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, which is expected to start operating in the first half of 2009.
The foundation will bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone in collaboration on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones.
According to Nigel Clifford, chief exeuctive of Symbian, it could signal a sea-change in how the software platform is developed.
"We're freeing up innovation - this is epoch-making . Nothing like this has been put into the open-source community before."
The aim is to unite several different existing operating systems - Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP.
The deal is a logical move, according to Handelsbanked analyst Karri Rinta.
"There was pressure for Nokia to increase its holding, especially since there were owners such as Panasonic and Siemens, who were there for historical reasons."
Android response?
The news comes one day after reports that Google's Android platform for mobile phones had suffered delays.
According to the Wall Street Journal, several firms who had signed up to the open-source platform were having difficulty coming up with their own custom applications in time for the planned launch later this year.
At a Symbian press conference, Kai Oistamo, executive vice president of Nokia denied that the take-over was a response to Android.
"This is taking the most proven software to open-source. It has an unparalleled exisiting ecosystem. It will create a gravitational pull that no developer will be able to ignore," he said.
(BBC)
<< Back