Nokia buys Symbian and opens up smartphone software

By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia will pay $410 million (208 million pounds) for the remaining shares in UK-based smartphone software maker Symbian and make its software royalty-free to other phone makers, in response to new rivals such as Google Inc.

The world's biggest cell phone maker said on Tuesday it would contribute Symbian's assets to a not-for-profit organisation in which it would unite with leading handset makers, network operators and communications chipmakers to create an open-source platform with wide industry appeal.

Symbian software is used in two-thirds of smartphones -- mobile handsets with computer-like capabilities -- but Apple Inc's iPhone or new categories of phones based on Google's Android software could challenge that dominance.

"It indicates that Nokia is worried by the rise of lower-cost operating systems from Google Android and LiMo Foundation," analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics said on Tuesday. LiMo is an industry consortium to promote the popular free Linux software on phones.

Symbian was formed exactly a decade ago to the day in London by a consortium of top mobile handset makers looking for a standardized way of building software to run new phones. It was the descendant of software used to run Psion electronic organizers popular with business professionals in the 1990s.

Symbian's closest rival is Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, which has just 13 percent of the market despite the U.S. software maker's drive to gain share.

Microsoft charges $8 to $15 per phone, according to research firm Strategy Analytics, while Symbian has charged, on average, $4.10 a device.

"This puts a lot of pressure on Microsoft right at a time when they are trying to really push into the consumer space," Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said of Nokia's bid to drop royalty prices. "For operators this offers a good alternative to Android," she said.