A rough guide to mobile open source

What is Symbian?
By far the most successful smartphone operating system in the world, Symbian is the product of a UK-based company that was mostly owned by Nokia, until recently.

Nokia has now bought up the bits of Symbian that it did not already own, and has joined forces with various manufacturers in a bid to combine Symbian with its derivates, UIQ and Series 60, and turn the whole resulting platform into open source. Pictured above is Nokia's E71, one of the most recent phones to use the Symbian-derived Series 60 platform.

What are the pros?
Symbian's massive popularity already makes it the first choice for developers who want to address the widest possible smartphone-user market. The open-source version will, therefore, garner great interest from an established developer community.

Nokia is also the biggest mobile-phone manufacturer in the world, and its leadership of the platform will automatically put the open-source Symbian into a wide variety of handsets.

What are the cons?
Symbian, in its present form, includes a lot of third-party, proprietary code that will need to be stripped out over the next year or two, before the open-source version of the platform makes its debut. Symbian is still working with third parties, and it remains unclear as to how the company will clear this hurdle and still come out with a recognisable, attractive platform.

Next: Maemo.