Nokia and the Symbian Foundation announced Monday some major changes surrounding the open source Symbian OS. First and foremost, the Symbian Foundation will no longer be responsible for OS development as of March 2011. Instead, Nokia will take on the task, leaving the Foundation responsible for licensing the software to manufacturers and other partners. Nokia says the move will allow it to issue updates more efficiently. As other manufacturers continue to look elsewhere, Nokia says it is still committed to th...

Symbian Foundation head Lee Williams has stepped down from his role effective Tuesday, the company said in an official statement. Williams, whose title was Executive Director, has been replaced by former Chief Financial Officer Tim Holbrow. Symbian is majority-owned by Nokia, a company that is no stranger to shakeups at the top — the Finnish manufacturer recently named a new CEO and shuffled several executive roles. Nokia also lost its head of mobile solutions last month when Anssi Vanjoki resigned. Despite...

It is official. The Symbian Foundation has released Symbian as an open source product today, four months ahead of its scheduled mid-2010 completion date. As with other open source projects, the move will allow developers to modify and contribute to the source code in hopes of improving the overall quality and hastening the development of the operating system. An open source Symbian can also be installed on any compatible device for free which should help to further expand Symbian’s reach and solidify Sy...

Well, at least the significance of the Symbian Duck’s giant robotic feet is clear now — they’re going to walk all over developers! Oh come on. We kid… We kid… Truth be told, there’s no one as happy as we are to learn that Symbian^4 will finally break app compatibility. This obvious-turned-revelatory tidbit was covered in a recent interview with Symbian Foundation Catalyst and Futurist David Wood where he discusses the death of Avkon and the birth of Qt where UI elements are...

Making a mobile OS “open” is one thing, but this is unlike anything we’ve seen to date. The Symbian Foundation — the newly formed group charged with bringing Nokia’s ever-popular OS into the 21st century — needs your help. Finding a way to update that aged UI is a bit trying we presume (though we wouldn’t mind seeing TAT finally give it a shot) so Scott Weiss, the Symbian Foundation’s UI Technology Manager, has officially opened the UI conversation to the world....

Holy. Crap. So, umm, have you been wondering what the Symbian foundation has been up to since revealing the mother of all development schedules? A whole lot, is what it’s been up to. Long story short, the team has cooperated with ST-Ericsson and ARM to build the first working example of multi-core goodness running on production chips with an open OS. Short story long…Here’s what they slapped together:Single chip base band and application processor engineHSPA Modem Release7ARM® Cortex-A9 MPC...

It might have taken a while for the Symbian Foundation to get rolling but if its newly-announced development schedule is even close to accurate, play time is most definitely over. Symbian, shall we say, hasn’t exactly been speedy with platform updates in the past. Fast forward to the group’s new schedule seen above and we’re looking at a new platform every six months. Hmm. To start things off, the new platforms now have an agreed naming convention: Symbian^N, where N is the version number. T...

What do you do when the honeymoon is over and interest in your mobile OS is fading fast? Spin city! In a recent discussion with the New York Times, Microsoft VP of Windows Mobile Todd Peters happily explained that Microsoft has intentions to cut down on the number of Windows Mobile devices that reach the market in the future. Peters’ reasoning for the move:“I’d rather have fewer devices and be more focused,” he said. That way “we get better integration” between phone and operating system.Well ...

In what has been completely overshadowed by the announcement of the upcoming Nokia N97, Nokia announced today that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited. For those who don’t recall, Nokia announced back in June that it would be gobbling up the 52% of Symbian it did not already own and going open source. In a quick and dirty press release, Nokia stated that it has purchased 99.9% of Symbian shares it did not already own when the original announcement was made. Nokia handsets might take a ...

Following Google’s footsteps, Nokia and Symbian are really pushing forward with R&D by taking in several huge companies to gain access to Symbian. Notable companies include ARM, Visa, and Huawei amongst 52 companies that have expressed their interest in joining the Symbian Foundation. With such a huge following, the software and platform potential could create a formidable force to rival Google’s Android OS. Nokia plans on buying out all shareholders of Symbian for $410 million and make their...