In mobile news today, Nokia announced that they were buying up the remaining shares of Symbian, and would be donating the whole shebang to the Symbian Foundation to manage as an Open Source mobile operating system. So what does this mean?

First of all, it means that Nokia is worried that the Symbian platform's dominance of the smart-phone market is threatened by Google's upcoming Android platform and Apple's iPhone platform (and to a lesser extent Linux for mobile). Until a year ago, Symbian was sitting pretty as the number one mobile platform with anywhere between two thirds and three quarters of the global smart-phone market share, while Windows Mobile was a distant 2nd (as of Dec 07 Microsoft only had 12% market share). Since then, a lot has changed (i.e.: Apple released the iPhone, and Google announced Android). Google decided to take the open source route when they first announced Android late last year. That model has done well for them in terms of getting a lot of developers (and bloggers) excited, but they have had some challenges getting it out the door. Apple has been getting nothing but adoration from the development community ever since it announced their SDK, and more recently, an integrated storefront (the iTunes App store) that developers can sell applications through. If Nokia wants to go head-to-head against Apple and Google, it needs its own platform and ecosystem of developers.

Secondly, it means that Nokia is betting that by going open source, Symbian might eventually become the mobile-platform-of-choice for developers. Without a strong development community cranking out exciting applications (and now presumably making improvements to the core code), the platform will whither on the vine. Even with Nokia's popularity as a handset manufacturer, they've got a real selling job ahead of them, because as the hardware components becomes more commoditised, and more manufacturers spring up to leverage Android and Linux, the future of mobile technology will be software-centric. This much Apple has proven with the iPhone, and Google has confirmed with Android. Whether or not going open source will actually help remains to be seen. From what I've read, the Symbian platform is a pain in the ass to develop for.

Om Malik has a great analysis of the game so far over at GigaOM. Make sure to read the comments.

Image source: CNET