MySpace, HP, Qualcomm And Others Pledge Support For Symbian

Friday, Feb 13, 2009

The Symbian Foundation, which is working to make its mobile operating open under the guidance of its parent company Nokia (NYSE: NOK), said today it has signed up at least 14 more companies to join its efforts. New companies include Bank of America, MySpace, Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) and SanDisk (NSDQ: SNDK). In all, Symbian has 78 industry partners pledging their support to the platform. Nokia plans to contribute all of Symbian’s assets to a not-for-profit, which will then work with its partners to release an open source mobile operating system. The first software release is expected this year, but a new platform should be available by June 2010. With 78 partners signed up, Symbian is now ahead of Google’s Android operating system, which announced in December that it has 47 members, and is also beating the LiMo Foundation, which is working on creating an open-source platform based on Linux. According to LiMo’s web site, it has about 55 members.