Fighting back
Nokia has secured a loan of €500 million from the European Investment Bank in order to invest in Symbian.
Symbian is the predominant operating system (OS)found on mobile phones but its market leadership is coming under increased pressure from the growth in the smartphone market and the consequent increasing use of OSs like Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Google's Android and Apple's OS for the iPhone.
Nokia announced it was going to buy the remaining shares from the other technology companies that had been its co-investors in Symbian last June. Its continued stated intention is to open up the Symbian platform and make it royalty-free via a new organisation called The Symbian Foundation. In this respect it will follow a similar philosophy to Android.
"The five-year loan will be used to part-finance software research and development (R&D) projects Nokia is undertaking during 2009-2011 to make Symbian-based smartphones more competitive," said the Nokia press release.
The Symbian Foundation is intended to be a non-profit organisation that will start operations by the middle of this year.
Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular as technology enables handsets with more PC-like functionality. However they also face growing competition from other mobile smart devices like netbooks and MIDs.
