Symbian makes new friends

Don't call it a comeback: Despite a solid year of competitive pressure from Apple, Google, RIM and the like, the world's biggest mobile OS system got bigger again on Thursday with the addition of 14 companies to the Symbian Foundation.

The Nokia-run non-profit foundation, still working toward its goal of an open mobile platform, increases its roster to 78 in just eight months of existence. Members are committed to creating an open-source platform, and have access to Nokia's Symbian software royalty-free.

Nokia benefits, according to the company, by decreasing time-to-market for new products, and blending all the flavors (Symbian OS, S60, UIQ, MOAP(S)) into one OS-that-is-Symbian helps to clear up lingering confusion in a difficult market.

The Foundation's new members are Atelier, Bank of America, Gemalto, HP, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, MySpace, Nanoradio, Omron Software, Qualcomm, SanDisk, SESCA, SiRF Technology, and VirtualLogix.

Nokia expects to roll out a new Symbian platform by June 2010, two years from the Foundation's launch, and says the first Foundation software will be available later in 2009, it was previously announced that the software will be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. In late 2008, the company completed its acquisition of Symbian Limited, the company that develops and licenses the Symbian operating system.

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