Nokia, Symbian, and the Mobile Landscape

The biggest news today is that Nokia is buying the rest of Symbian and releasing it as open source under Symbian Foundation.  Nokia is also planning on a big application ecosystem around symbian focusing on bringing web-based services to the handsets.  So things are getting interesting.  We now have:

• Google/Android/Open Handset Alliance with massive developer support and well, Google's weight behind it, but no handsets yet
• Apple/iPhone with impressive and proven "next generation" user experience, fully connected with 3G and GPS coming, a very fast growing user base but not "open"
• Nokia/Symbian, not as sexy as Android and certainly iPhone but with a huge huge user base, now going the open route
• And LIMO, promising a fully open Linux for mobile platform, but with pretty young anyway you look at it without the carisma of a Steve Jobs that would pull a zero-to-dominate-the-market-in-sixty-seconds.

So the market is interestingly shifting, and obviously regardless of what Android delivers in the end it looks like its existance has caused some really interesting changes in the mobile landscape.  Without Android I don't think Nokia would be doing this.

I'm planning to contemplate some more on how this new picture will change the market...  UPDATE:  Read Om Malik's commentary on the subject.  It's good.