Nokia buys Symbian and then gives it away…

Nokia has bought the rest of Symbian and has “given” it away to the community via the Symbian Foundation.

Probably in response to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, Nokia has purchased the rest of Symbian and has announced, according to the The Register, that it will be then “giving it away”.

Nokia has bought up the bits of Symbian it didn’t already own and is chucking the OS into an open-source foundation along with the S60 UI layer, accompanied by Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo, who are throwing in UIQ and MOAP(S) respectively.

The BBC adds:

Nokia, which already owns 48% of the UK-based firm, intends to develop its software to compete with Google’s planned Android operating system.

This is an interesting response by Nokia to the “threat” posed by Android and the iPhone.

Android will make Jaiku win over Twitter

Excellent blog article on though Twitter is winning the battle in the numbers game, Jaiku will win the war once Android starts shipping.

What if Google where to build Jaiku into Android as the standard phone Address Book? As soon as Android devices started to ship, Jaiku (whatever form it takes in the future) would gain hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users rapidly.

Read the full blog entry, makes for interesting reading.

Personally I much prefer Jaiku over Twitter, the RSS and the comments allow for me a much deeper richer experience, more importantly as well it allows for interactivity much more easily than Twitter. This for me is why Jaiku has more potential for e-learning than Twitter.

However, ever since Google bought Jaiku, sign-ups have been restricted, let me know if you want an invite, and there have been quite a few 504 errors with Jaiku slow and unresponsive at times.

Hopefully with a day off tomorrow for Jaiku (what am I going to do) Jaiku will get even better and more reliable.

Follow me on Jaiku, though as you might expect I am also on Twitter.

In case you were wondering, android is an open source mobile phone platform.