Several major mobile manufacturers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo, declared about their intention to unite the S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) versions of the Symbian operating system so that to create a unified mobile software platform. Together with Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone they mean to set up the Symbian Foundation to support and promote Symbian as a single platform. Membership in this non-profit foundation will be open for any company to join.

Nokia intend to acquire all the shares of Symbian they don’t own, which will enable them to establish the Symbian Foundation. Each of the participants of the foundation - Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, DoCoMo are going to contribute their S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) assets respectively. The unified platform will be available for free for all the participants. Nokia is expected to offer a total of approximately €264 million for the rest of the Symbian shares.

One thing is perfectly clear: the new formation around Symbian comes as a counterbalance to the Android campaign that is gathering pace. The latter is developed by the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and initiated by Google. The Symbian Foundation is expected to begin operating in the first half of next year.