Nokia Completes Symbian Ltd. Acquisition

Nokia has completed its takeover of Symbian Limited, the company that makes and licenses the Symbian mobile operating system. Next step: free the platform.

Nokia has completed its takeover of Symbian Limited, the company that creates and licenses the Symbian mobile operating system used in a broad swath of Nokia phones and devices, as well as mobile devices from LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and others.

The takeover, announced like June, is part of a move to set up Symbian as a royalty-free platform through the Symbian Foundation—in order to set the operating system free (and, hopefully, thereby encourage its use by a broader range of developers), Nokia had to buy up shares of Symbian Limited that it didn’t already own. At the time the deal was announced, Nokia owned about 48 percent of the company; it has since acquired over 99.9 percent of the outstanding shares, satisfying the terms of the takeover deal.

Symbian Limited employees will officially work for Nokia starting February 1, 2009.

By freeing up the Symbian operating system for royalty development, Nokia hopes to bolster the platform so it can readily compete with both proprietary operating systems (like Windows Mobile and the version of Mac OS X Apple bakes into the iPhone) as well as open systems like Google Android and the mobile Linux movement. And Symbian has a distinct edge: it’s already used in about two-thirds of all smartphones sold worldwide.