Mannerisms

 "Strategy Analytics believes that the Symbian Foundation provides another compelling choice to handset manufacturers to cut their software bill of materials", says Stephen Entwistle, Vice President of the Strategic Technologies Practice, at Strategy Analytics, who also believes that "this move will help Nokia to effectively counter the looming threat from royalty free mobile Linux offerings, Android and LiMo."

For Windows Mobile, Microsoft's mobile OS which has Intel as its supporter, it looks as if the going will get sticky. "For Microsoft, the pressure will surely mount to cut the price of its licence fees to handset vendors, which we estimate to be a relatively high $14 per unit worldwide in 2008", says Strategy Analytics' Bonny Joy.

A third Strategy Analytics expert, Sravan Kundojjala, takes the view: "The Symbian Foundation announcement may make Microsoft's Windows Mobile consumer market ambitions tougher, but this scenario presents a good opportunity to Microsoft's Silverlight in its competition with Adobe's Flash Lite, SUN's Java and Qualcomm's BREW. This move accelerated the inevitable move away from the base OS to a focus on applications and services."

Nokia is expected to use royalty-free Symbian software primarily as a tool to drive handset sales. The good news is that it looks as if no one will be able to do to mobile internet operating systems what Microsoft did to the PC OS.