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Nokia is buying the 52% of Symbian that it didn’t own, and spinning off the mobile software company into a new entity called the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericcson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo are the other partners in a long-needed effort to reunite the various forks of the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system. AT&T, LG, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments. and Vodafone have commited themselves to the new effort. Samsung is also expected to join the foundation. See this article from the Associated Press for more information.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• iPhone
• 20 April 2008: Mobile phones - the cure for global poverty?
• 21 February 2008: Nokia brings back N-GAGE
• 20 February 2008: Mobile phone platform wars
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 20 January 2008: Nokia, Sprint announce layoffs

Steve Tobak is fretting about his new Sony laptop computer, because it’s having problems and he doesn’t have time to fix it.

Sounds like he needs a Mac.

The platform wars are heating up in the mobile phone industry. It is very difficult for a mobile carrier to support several different handset operating systems. Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin estimated that his UK-based company supports 30 or 40 different OSes, according to this MacWorld UK report. Sarin is also quited in this Business Week article.

It takes a great deal of effort to establish a computing standard. Consider Apple, which became a new entrant with its iPhone. There are about 4 million Apple iPhones available or in use now, which is a respectable number when one considers its limited availability. There are no official iPhone providers in China or Japan yet, for example.

Google won’t make or market its own mobile phone, especially now that the company has dropped out of the 700 mHz auction, as reported by Forbes. The company’s Android mobile phone platform is based upon Linux, and over 30 companies have signed on to develop and support Android hardware. Prototypes of the Google phone were shown in Frankfurt at the Mobile World Congress this week. This CNET slideshow starts with a pic of one such prototype, which appears to be running and connected to a GSM network.

Microsoft used a similar approach to develop its Windows Mobile platform for PDAs and smartphones. The company expects that 20 million Windows Mobile phones from various manufacturers will be sold in the first half of 2008. None of these phones are Microsoft-branded devices.

Symbian claims to have the top spot, with 77 million units sold in the last year. Nokia is the main manufacturer that uses the Symbian operating system, along with Sony Ericsson. The latter company has started using Windows Mobile in its high-end smartphones, however.

For more information, see my earlier articles tagged as mobile, including:

• 11 February 2008: The modular mobile phone
• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 11 January 2008: BlackBerry vs iPhone
• 26 November 2007: Mobile devices for US census takers
• 24 September 2007: Do you want a PC on your iPhone?
• 23 April 2007: Samsung and Microsoft further their convergence goals

From the Register: Nokia has achieved a new milestone by posting a 40.2 percent share of the global mobile phone market.

This is a massive market, as mobile phone adoption continues to surpass personal computer sales in many regions. The estimated total shipments for 2007 was 1.13 billion mobile phones, with a 12 percent growth forecast for 2008.

Results for the fourth quarter of 2007 were as follows, according to a press release from Strategy Analytics. Figures are in millions of units:

2.3: Apple iPhone
23.7: LG
30.8: Sony Ericsson
40.9: Motorola
46.9: Samsung
133.5: Nokia

Business Week has an article about an interesting merger of two video game companies. Bandai bought Namco in September 2005, and Namco Bandai became the 3rd largest video game copmany in Japan.Here’s another article: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4252&Itemid=2

In the early years of the industry, Namco was best known for the Pac-Man, Galaxian and Frogger arcade games, as well as their use of the number 765 as a corporate symbol. In the PlayStation era, Namco found success with Tekken and Soul Calibur.

Bandai developed several popular series, as well as the Mobile Suit Gundam, Power Rangers and Cowboy Bebop multimedia franchises.

Both companies each struck licensing deals to put their games on home video game systems. I used to play the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. It was tolerable, but at least I could save my quarters.

Both companies had strong relationships with the Sony PlayStation groups. Namco Bandai has developed two games for the PlayStation 3 launch, new versions of Mobile Suit Gundam and Ridge Racer. This is amazing, considering that the PS3 is a brand new console that was launched at different dates in Japan and the United States.

The company has also set up software development teams in the US, while maintaining its development offices in Korea and Japan. The US office focuses on porting older Namco and Bandai games to mobile phones. Rereleasing old intellectual property (IP) is a common business model in publishing.