The open source Android finally made Symbian wrap off the cover from its codes and get into the Mobile OS war fully armed as the Symbian Foundation announced the much-awaited decision of making its code open source.

The move that had actually been taken in 2008 has finally reached its final destination and Symbian is now open for the developers to experiment. Symbian3, the new version of the OS, is now free and 100% open to all.  More than 330 million phones around the globe use Symbian but because of the new OSs launching in the market and falling market share of the Nokia handsets , Symbian had been losing its grounds in the industry.

“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams executive director of the Symbian Foundation  told BBC News. “It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.”

“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams , “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”

At present the Nokia primarily controls the development of Symbion but the Symbian foundation is now in plans to reduce Nokia’s input to “no more than 50%” by 2011.

The move will no doubt boost up the use of Symbian OS and it will yet again emerge as a potential opponent against the other mobile OSs.  2010 will be a very interesting and exciting year for mobile enthusiasts.

Image source: inf.u-szeged

The smartphone market had been heating up with the latest high tech and most sophisticated technology and there were many players fighting to mark a niche with their innovation. But as Apple and RIM were seen taking a lead in the industry, Nokia was loosing onto its glorious market records. But the Finnish company is back in the race as it reports of 132 percent increase in operating profit year-on-year and a positive sign in its growth statistics.

Nokia’s revenues from smartphones increased 26% from the previous quarter to 3.9 billion euros and the major credit goes to the sales of high-end smartphones, the N-series and E-series,  that grew from 8.9 million to 10.7 million between the third and fourth quarters of 2009.

“We grew our market share in smartphones in the fourth quarter, driven by the successful launch of new touch and Qwerty models,” said Nokia’s chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

“Our performance in smartphones, combined with continuing success in the emerging markets, helped us increase sales in our devices & services unit, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year.”

Nokia is well determined to win its shares back from its competitors and Apple takes the top spot in the list.

“Apple continues to be a great competitor, no doubt about that,” Mr. Kallasvuo said. “But we have our assets as well. Our strategy is in democratizing the smartphone in a massive way.”

Nokia reported a net profits of 882m euros for the last three months of 2009, a 53% increase on the 576m euros recorded a year earlier. However, Sony Ericsson and Motorola continued to struggle, selling 14.6 million and 12 million phones, respectively.

Image source: mobilestormer