Nokia Corp. is buying Britain's Symbian Ltd., the consortium that makes the software for its phones, and making it available for free to other manufacturers in an effort to scale back competition.
Nokia said Tuesday that it is offering to buy the 52 percent of Britain's Symbian Ltd. that it doesn't already own for about 410 million U.S. dollars. Symbian's software is the most widely used on high-end phones.
Nokia will then establish a foundation with handset makers Sony Ericsson and Motorola Inc. and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to make the software available royalty-free. They will combine their three different versions of the Symbian software for advanced, data-enabled phones into one open platform.
AT&T Inc., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., STMicroelectronics N.V., Texas Instruments Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC will also join the foundation, Nokia said.
Nokia said all previous owners of Symbian, except Samsung, have committed themselves to accept the offer and that it expects Samsung to join them shortly.
Symbian has previously licensed its software in exchange for royalties. Nokia and Sony Ericsson have been its leading users, but Sony Ericsson is soon bringing out its first phone that uses Windows Mobile, Microsoft Corp.'s competing software.
Another challenge to Symbian is coming from the LiMo Foundation, which is creating a version of the open-source Linux software for cell phones. Like Linux, LiMo will be free to use. Google Inc. is making its own, Linux-based software, which will also be free.
In May, Verizon Wireless committed to using LiMo as its main software. Motorola Inc., NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone and Samsung are also LiMo members.
Source: Xinhua\agencies
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