Dulles: June 25, 2008 - Yesterday morning Nokia announced the creation of the Symbian Foundation. Nokia will purchase the remaining 52% of Symbian shares and donate the source code to the open source community through the Symbian Foundation. In 2007 there were 77 million Symbian smartphones sold worldwide dominating the smartphone market. Initial reports indicate the first handsets based on open source Symbian will appear in early 2010. By placing Symbian in the open source community, Nokia joins Google (Android), Apple (iPhone SDK) and AOL (Open Mobile Platform) in supporting an 'open' or 'open like' mobile development solution.
Symbian is one of the oldest and most used mobile OS (200 million sold over the past 7 years). Symbian third party development has a reputation of being more tedious that mobile Java. Yet, corporate support for Symbian (Nokia, Samsung and Sony Erricsson) is substantial. Symbian needs major upgrades to compete with the best of class Apple iPhone and corporate favorite Blackberry. By placing Symbian in the open source community, Nokia is counting on third party developers to create the features and tools needed for Symbian to maintain it's dominance in the smartphone arena.
The AOL Open Mobile Platform (OMP) 0.5 is targeted for an August 31, 2008 open source release. OMP targets the large feature phone segment (80%) of the mobile market. OMP not only provides mobile developers with a development environment that supports multiple mobile OSs, but enables thoird party developers to access AOL services including Third Screen Media to monetize their applications. By combining AOL monetization services with an open source development environement, OMP provides mobile developers with a significant incentive to create unique and profitable applications.
This is a significant opportunity for AOL to do well in the mobile market. Our target audience is very large, OMP will be open source before Symbian and Android and the full benefits of Platform A and Third Screen Media will be available to mobile developers.