Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source

Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening." Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."

Comments

Too little, too late

[SuperKendall]

Android has the advantage of support from many hardware makers.

Apple has the advantage of making very specific hardware with a very modern phoneOS (not to imply Android is also not a modern OS and API).

Nokia has a huge range of phones, and at this point the Symbian OS and API is very dated, and not nearly as capable or easy to use. Nokia will be forced to adopt Android shortly I think (year or two).

There's only room for one other player I think, but I'm pretty sure it's Windows Mobile (though force of will) or PalmOS (if Microsoft or Nokia buys them, though perhaps they can still stick it out on their own).