Nokia has announced the buyout of of Symbian Limited by acquiring all of the shares that it does not already own. The acquisition will result in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, which will comprise of Nokia, together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, details of which are available at www.symbianfoundation.org.

Sony Ericsson and Motorola intend to contribute technology from UIQ while DOCOMO has indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source.

The next generation Symbian devices would hopefully combine the best of features from all three platforms- S60, UIQ and MOAP - offering better compatibility of applications and games across a wide range of mobile phones for end consumers. Being open-source, this would also put some heat on other platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, RIM Blackberry and Google Android, bringing more developers into its fold.