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Symbian "it's all mine!" says Nokia. But is it too late?

Pundits are excitedly greeting the new day with the surprise of finding that Nokia has, after all, bought Symbian from its partners, paying "about $400m" to ten corporations - five phone makers and five chip makers.

Analysis from Ben Wood suggests that the sale was prompted by a sense that nobody was driving the train, and someone had to take control. "

I think Nokia was more worried about the risk that Symbian’s structure would erode its competitive position. Over the last ten years, Symbian has grown into the dominant supplier of smartphone operating systems, but it’s being challenged by a variety of new contenders"

  These factors, he thinks, are:

The LiMo Foundation has strong support from network operators, which have been attracted by its governance model. Operators believe they have more opportunity to influence the direction of this open-source platform than with Symbian and its S60 and UIQ user interfaces.

Apple has raised the bar from a technical perspective, and Symbian licensees need to respond quickly to its touch-screen user interface, high performance and easy-to-use development tools.

Google has challenged the commercial model, stating that its Android platform has reduced the cost of software to "close to zero".

The official announcement quotes Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia as saying:

"This is a significant milestone in our software strategy" said . "Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers."

But what most industry observers will be concerned about, is whether this makes Symbian a proprietary, one-company product.

Bed Wood thinks not:

Ironically, it might even make Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Google’s Android look overly proprietary and dominated by a single player.

And it's necessary, says Wood, for Nokia to respond to smartphone competition and open source threats.