World’s number one mobile and cell phones company Nokia has completely acquired the Symbian software, a UK based smart phone software company. Its most popular software is Symbian OS. Symbian OS is a operating system, designed for mobile devices, with associated libraries, user interface frameworks and reference implementations of common tools. Now Nokia will have to pay $410 million for rest of the shares. Also the Symbian software has become open source. This step is taken to combat Google’s mobile software Andriod. Actually, Nokia is worried by the rise of low-cost operating systems for mobile phones from Google Android and LiMo Foundation. The other aim of this acquisition is to provide royalty-free open platform to developers and accelerate innovations in this industry.

The Symbian software company will be renamed as Nokia’s Symbian Foundation. It will be a not-for-profit organization or you can say an open platform for leading handset makers, network operators and communications chip makers to create an open-source platform and do research and development in this field. Symbian software is used by two-thirds of smart phones. Symbian’s closest rival is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, which has just 13 % of the market share. Apple Inc’s iPhone or new categories of phones based on Google’s Android software may challenge the empire of Symbian software. No doubt, Symbian OS is the leading OS in the ’smart mobile device’ market. Other competitors for Symbian OS are Palm OS, iPhone OS, Qualcomm’s BREW, Google Android and SavaJe.