Nokia all the way!

-Contributed by Ankit

With 3G Iphone hogging all the limelight in recent past, one big news which many might have neglected was the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia. Nokia will now create a foundation which will give away Symbian's softwares for free.

Nokia by taking this step has made it clear that they are not going to get bogged down by any American companies( read Apple, Google and Microsoft). Until now Symbian was owned by a consortium comprised of Nokia and other handset companies. Symbian is the most widely used mobile phone platform with 56% of marketshare.

But in recent past, companies like Apple and Google have threatened to eat into Symbian's market share. But with Symbian giving away the softwares free of cost, the tables have seemed to turn in Nokia's favour. With the ever growing market for VAS, Nokia is looking to develop all the applications through in-house development.But one challenge that Nokia faces is, that, they need to provide many more handsets which can deliver these next generation services. Symbian is mostly used in Nokia's high end phones such as the N series and they must look to start using Symbian in less expensive and mass market products.

Nokia has stiff competition from Google who is backing a web friendly software platform called Android and other groups who are promoting Linux for mobile phones. Apple's success story is known to all and they claim to have sold 1 million 3G Iphones within 3 days of its release.To counter competition from such major software giants, Nokia has shrewdly made the Symbian software open and free. This would mean that More people will use the software and also improve it.Besides this, the economics of this deal also makes sense as Nokia has been paying $250 million to Symbian yearly. So, its definitely better to pay $410 million to buy the company once and for all.Their are some concerns though such as the involvement of Motorola with Symbian aswell as Android and LiMO. It is highly unlikely that there will be a monopoly of any one operating system as in the case of PCs where Microsoft is a clear leader. In the case of mobiles, only that operating system which keeps on developing continuously will prevail.

Reference: Businessweek Magazine