The whole Symbian situation has always completely baffled me. There’s the Symbian OS which is on 60% of converged mobile devices worldwide, but it comes in flavors: S60, MOAP (S), UIQ. I have no idea what the actual differences are, but one version of software won’t work on all of them. Oh, and Nokia owns most but not all of Symbian, and it makes S60, but Sony Ericsson and Motorola partner on UIQ and DOCOMO has MOAP (S).

My head hurts.

Nokia, the 400 lb. gorilla in this confederation, apparently had a headache, too. Today Nokia announced plans to buy the roughly half of Symbian Limited it does not already own (and unlike some big tech deals, the current owners have agreed to sell). Then all of the players will contribute the OS and/or interface they own to the new Symbian Foundation, where everything Symbian will be combined into a single platform.

The Symbian platform will be open source but kept consistent across all devices. That should make life easier for handset makers, carriers, and software developers, not to mention consumers. Call Symbian the Linux of the mobile world, only with a lot more market share.

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