Nokia plans to buy the rest of Symbian for a whopping £200m so it can give the OS and S60 interface to the newly formed Symbian Foundation. Nok currently owns just under half of Symbian, with the balance split between Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung.
Everyone but Samsung has so far agreed to Nok’s deal of about £2.90 per share, which will give it around 91 percent of the software company, although it’s expecting Samsung will take the money too.
The deal is essential to setting up the Symbian Foundation, which will establish Symbian as an open source, royalty free OS available to members.
This is a massive deal for Symbian and if the parties involved can get their skates on we could potentially see it rolled out ahead of Google’s Android OS which has apparently hit delays. Nokia is hoping to get everything signed, sealed and delivered by the end of the year, so we should hopefully start seeing exciting things from the Symbian Foundation early 2009.
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