Symbian OS now open source and free to developers

The source code for the ten-year old Symbian OS platform is now completely open source and available for free. The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history, according to the Symbian Foundation.

In a statement, Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation said “The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,”  “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.” This means that, although the likes of Android and WebOS have been the main talking point of early 2010, that symbian, which powers pretty much all Nokia handsets could be adapted into HTC, Samsung and even Motorola handsets. What’s more, because Symbian is so developer friendly, and is now free, lots more third party applications can now be developed and implemented into mobile phones.

Symbian has been shipped on over 330 million handset devices, and since last year a major share of the Symbian Foundation was acquired by Nokia. Nokia then, quite rightly so, began to open up the Symbian source code. It is quite exciting to see that Symbian is now open source 4 months ahead of its original schedule, as this means that developers have more of a choice to innovate and modify Symbian ahead of the next Android update. This comes as news that Android powered handsets will be shipped in the tens of millions throughout 2010, with HTC, Samsung and Motorola increasingly implementing the young OS into their mobile handsets.