Nokia’s bold announcement about its intentions to spend $410 million for acquiring the whole pack of shares for the Symbian platform in order to develop a new royalty-free mobile software platform, took the market by surprise as it is a strong move for leaving way behind competitors such as Google’s Android, the Palm operating system, the iPhone operating system, SavaJe and Qualcomm’s BREW.

The open sourcing will cause an even bigger popularity rise for Symbian, which is already the world’s leading mobile platform, as all carriers and device manufacturers are always looking for new ways of distancing themselves from their competitors.

The Symbian operating system, released by Symbian Ltd. was specially designed for mobile devices, associating user interface frameworks, reference implementations of tools and libraries. The idea involved the smooth transition of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)’s features onto the mobile phones.  Symbian Ltd. is owned by Nokia with 56.3 percent, Ericsson with 15.6 percent, Sony Ericsson with 13.1 percent, Panasonic has 10.5 percent and Samsung owns 4.5 percent.

All the above mentioned companies have agreed to Nokia’s plan and the new open source Symbian OS will be offered under a royalty-free license to all members of the nonprofit Symbian Foundation group founded by Nokia in collaboration with Sony Ericsson, Samsung Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Vodafone and Texas Instruments.

Nokia’s officials presented the strong points that contribute to the massive global success of the Symbian platform, as its current advanced state demanded more than 10 years of development, its services are used by more than 200 million people and it also holds support from several global mobile phone vendors and operators. This could also be the reason why new platforms such as Android had a hard time entering the market, as it is always considered easier to further develop an existing system than to start building a new one.

"We've been living in a very disciplined, very focused, mobile-orientated environment for the last ten years. So we understand what operators need, we understand what mobile handset manufacturers need, silicon vendors, and application partners. And we do that stuff; that's what we do every single day," said Symbian's Nigel Clifford, according to Beta News.

The same difficulties were encountered by Windows Mobile as the high license fees for its operating system managed to scare many potential customers. Furthermore, with the upcoming Symbian rebirth, Windows will have an even harder mission convincing people to acquire its costly OS at the expense of Nokia's free Symbian platform. The solution for Windows and the rest of the competition will probably come in the form of a new set of much lower prices combined with several new additions to their offer.

Apparently, only two of Symbian’s rivals might be in clear waters once Nokia’s plan goes into action, as RIM and Apple are confident in the support received by their user base. RIM holds the majority in the market’s niche of e-mail-centric mobile devices and Apple’s customer base will probably, just as until now, continue to support the company’s releases.