Nokia buying Symbian, readies for Mobile race

With Nokia already owning about 48% of the Symbian company, they have made an offer to buyout the other owners (Sony Ericsson, Samsung and others). This is in addition to its recent buying spree — they just bought a Social Network startup called Plazes.

It seems that Nokia is preparing to position itself in maintaining its dominance in the mobile space. With Google’s impending entrance into the space with Android and Apple’s great market acceptance for it’s iPhones, Nokia has been acquiring some resources (acquired Plazes – social network, Trolltech – graphical framework, Navteq – mapping, now Symbian – mobile OS) in preparation for the storm. Nokia has also been putting up different services like an Ad Network, Music Service and Maps.

The mobile market is huge. With current number of mobile phones worldwide placed at over 2 billion and is expected to increase more over the near future, Nokia wants to make sure that it maintains its dominance.

The current mobile phone market is also becoming more and more Internet-enabled and things like social networking, multi-user games, advertisements, location-dependent services are seen as great ways to bring in the cash.

Nokia’s plan seems to be to open source the Symbian platform and create another alternative to the already several open mobile platform alternatives (Android Alliance, Limo Foundation, Montavista, AOL’s open mobie platform, Sun’s JavaFX ). Nokia has already put up the Symbian Foundation — “to unify Symbian and set it free”.

Overall I think that these global events are actually quite good for the market and the consumer since it will provide alternative services.

For the developers, it will be a two-sided coin ‘coz there will be a lot of platforms that developers will need know, understand and develop in their products. I could just imagine the work of businesses like game publishers need to prepare for in order to be a global leader in all these open mobile platforms.

And if you want to develop that next killer mobile application, better be prepared to have it working in all the major open mobile platforms.