Nokia Takes Control of Symbian

Nokia said Monday that it is reestablishing control over the direction of its Symbian operating system, reversing a decision in 2008 to make it open source. 

The Espoo, Finland-based company plans to invest its own
resources in the development of Symbian, the world's most widely-used mobile platform. Nokia said it will take control of Symbian starting in April, while the cross-industry Symbian Foundation will focus only on licensing the software.

In 2008, Nokia offered Symbian to any handset maker for free on an open-source basis. But in the face of the extraordinary success of Google's Android operating system, Symbian failed to win wide adoption among manufacturers.

This year alone, Samsung and Sony Ericsson abandoned Symbian in favor of Android.

"There has since been a seismic change in the mobile market but also more generally in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members," said Tim Holbrow, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. "The result of this is that the current governance structure for the Symbian platform -- the foundation -- is no longer appropriate."

Analysts believe that Symbian will soon be a Nokia-only platform, and that the company will de-emphasize its development in favor of MeeGo, it's new mobile platform. But the company recently announced that it would put NFC, or near-field communication, functions in all its future Symbian phones, which will allow the devices to be used for mobile payments and identification at points-of-sale.

Symbian, which is still the world's most widely-used platform, continues to lead the mobile market with a 37 percent share in the third quarter. However, this figure is significantly lower compared with its market share from two years ago.

By contrast, Google's Android leap-frogged ahead of Apple last quarter to take 17 percent of the market last quarter, and it only continues to grow