Nokia to open source Symbian OS

Mobile phone giant Nokia made everyone sit up when it announced on Tuesday that it will open source the venerable Symbian operating system. To do so involves a two-step process of buying out the other current stakeholders in the holding company, Symbian Limited, and then releasing the entire source code for Symbian under the Eclipse Public License.

Any doubts that Nokia is playing for keeps are effectively quashed when Nokia makes known its strategic intention for Symbian--already the top operating system for smartphones. In a nutshell, Nokia wants the Symbian OS "[to be the] most widely used software platform on the platform."

With the Symbian OS open sourced and Google's Android just around the corner, Microsoft might just find itself under a tad more pressure with its proprietary Windows Mobile operating system. After all, unlike Microsoft, the developers of the other proprietary Smartphone operating systems--RIM and Apple--make their own hardware as well.

Speaking of the BlackBerry, you might be interested to know that DataViz has finally announced the availability of Documents To Go for BlackBerry. Your ability to use it is still contingent upon a number of prerequisites, including yet to be released version 4.5 of the BlackBerry OS. Still, that can't be far off now. - Paul