As Symbian celebrates its 10th anniversary, the company is set to be subsumed into handset giant Nokia. But the Symbian OS platform is to be given a new lease of life as royalty-free software available to any vendor that wants to use it, a move intended to see an even broader range of handsets become available for customers.

The shake-up of Symbian, announced on 24 June, will see Symbian OS combined with the three most common user interfaces for Symbian handsets ­ Nokia’s S60, Sony Ericsson’s UIQ, and NTT Docomo’s Moap ­ to create a unified handset platform that will be available royalty-free under the Eclipse Public License.

Control of the platform is to be handed to a non-profit organisation, the Symbian Foundation, which will be established in 2009. The first complete release of the unified platform is currently set for the first half of 2010.

However, before either of these launches can happen, Nokia plans to acquire all of the outstanding shares in Symbian, making it part of Nokia, after which it will contribute Symbian OS and its S60 software to the foundation.

Nokia executive vice president Kai Öistämö said the move will revolutionise the industry the way Symbian did when it was first formed.

“This will enable an ecosystem to deliver new, exciting devices and new services,” he said. As the first version will be compatible with the current Symbian OS 9 release, the new software will “provide critical mass like no other mobile platform”, he added.

The move towards open-source is a bold step that ought to encourage handset vendors to build a broader range of devices, which should ultimately lead
to greater choice for buyers.

“I think it will help adoption beyond the vendors that use Symbian already, if the licensing is sufficiently fair and open,” said Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum.

Some experts have portrayed the decision as a response to Google’s Linux-based Android platform. However, Leach said he believed Symbian was more influenced by the Limo Foundation, another open-source initiative using Linux.

“If you look at what they’ve announced, it is similar to what Limo has done. I think they were more worried by the quiet, steady progress that Limo has made rather than Google’s self-publicity,” he said. Many of the Limo members ­ Motorola, NTT Docomo, Vodafone and Samsung ­ are also involved in the Symbian Foundation, he pointed out.

Morgan Gillis, executive director of Limo, issued a statement welcoming the announcement, saying it is “a natural evolution… because the future of the handset OS is far more about governance than technology”.

However, Leach said that the move to unify Symbian is the most significant step. Although Symbian OS runs on six of every 10 smartphones sold, the various user interfaces and builds used by vendors have made it impossible to create a single executable that will run across all of them.

“It addresses the problem of how you roll out applications across all these different mobile devices. Fragmentation has been stifling development,” he added.

But platform unification will not mean that all Symbian handsets will be the same. Sony Ericsson chief technology officer Mats Lindoff said that vendors will be able to differentiate their products to target different markets.

“There are very different requirements between the low-cost talk-and-text models and high-end smartphones,” he said.

In particular, there will still be the ability to customise the user interface, because this is a key requirement for network operators. “The new platform will make it easier to customise the look and feel, but the underlying technology will be the same,” Lindoff explained.

One factor that has been holding back Symbian is the perception that it was controlled by Nokia. While the move to open source Symbian OS may allay this fear, Nokia’s pending ownership of Symbian is likely to put it in a powerful position to influence the platform’s direction, at least in the near future. “Nokia will gain from acquiring Symbian employees and knowledge base ­ it will be a good investment,” said Öistämö.

However, while the Symbian platform faces growing competition in the enterprise market from RIM’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Nokia’s continued support means it is likely to remain the mainstay of business handsets in the near future.

Symbian might also gain a surprising convert after its platform becomes open source, according to Leach.

“RIM may decide it is in its best interest to move [BlackBerry to Symbian OS],” he said, but added this is unlikely to happen in the short term.

“Every handset vendor has to decide whether to build or buy the underlying platform, and I’m sure RIM is reviewing the situation all the time,” Leach said.