Nokia holds about 48 percent of Symbian, which specialises in open platform software for mobile phones and employs nearly 1,00 people.<\/p>\n
Ericsson, which has a 15.6 percent stake, has said it will accept the Nokia offer of 3.65 euros (5.66 dollars) per share, alongside Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens, giving Nokia 91 percent of the stock.<\/p>\n
Nokia said the deal will be followed by the formation of the Symbian Foundation with AT&T, LG Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone and others to create a single, royalty-free software platform.<\/p>\n
Membership of the non-profit foundation, due to be launched in the first half of next year, is open to any organisation, it added.<\/p>\n
Symbian software is found on about two thirds of the world’s smartphones, competing with the likes of Windows Mobile.<\/p>\n
Research house Strategy Analytics said the deal was bad news for its rivals, such as Microsoft and the Android system of Google.<\/p>\n
"This offers a good alternative to Android," said Carolina Milanesi of electronics industry monitoring group Gartner, and "will put a lot of pressure on Microsfot as it tries to dominate the market.<\/p>\n
"Operators and the market need lower prices to boost the development of smartphones and a free access platform is likely to help that," she added.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finnish mobile telephone giant Nokia said on Tuesday it will take full control of Symbian, a London-based software group, buying out the other shareholders for 264 million euros.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cellular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}