Symbian Foundation members have nominated Lee Williams as
Executive Director for the foundation, during a meeting held in London this
week. Lee is currently head of the S60 organization in Nokia’s Devices business,
where he will remain until January 1, 2009 or until the foundation and its
leadership are in place and operational.
All ten initial board members (AT&T, LG Electronics,
Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless,
Texas Instruments and Vodafone) have agreed to the nomination.
The decision should come as no surprise, since Lee has been
actively involved in the Symbian project. However, the selection is said to
have been extremely rigorous, and as Kris Rinne, Senior Vice President, Architecture
and Planning, AT&T, pointed out, Lee is “a strong and experienced leader”
and “a driving force in the establishment of the foundation.”
“To me, there can be no more exciting role in the mobile
software world than to lead the Symbian Foundation,” said Lee.
In addition to the nomination, the foundation also revealed
an increasing support in the Symbian Foundation from 52 companies in the
industry. In the first half of 2009, when the foundation is expected to begin
operations, even more companies are expected to express their support.
“The Symbian Foundation platform offering will be the most
proven and successful open mobile platform,” Rinne said. By June 2010, the
platform is expected to become available in open source, a movement that Rinne
says will enhance its appeal to developers, solutions providers and network
operators all over the world.
The Symbian operating system, released by Symbian Ltd. was
specially designed for mobile devices, associating user interface frameworks,
reference implementations of tools and libraries. A few month ago, Nokia
announced it would spend $410 million for acquiring the Symbian platform, in
order to develop a new royalty-free mobile software platform.
The move is expected to increase popularity for the Symbian
operating system, and is especially important now, as the iPhone and Android
are competing for supremacy on the mobile market.
