Google is stepping up its presence in the mobile space with a late-2007 announcement of Android, its mobile phone operating system that competes directly with existing phone operating systems such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Samsung announced an "open" mobile platform called "Bada," which appears to be a programmable UI layer that runs on its proprietary feature phones, although one report defines Bada as Samsung's own Linux OS. Meanwhile, a Korean analyst report claims that Samsung plans to discard Symbian and downshift Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Following their announcement back on the 4th of February, 2010… Symbian has released the first fully open source version of their mobile operating system, the Symbian^3 (S^3) platform.

Enterprises are still in the early days of mobile application development, but the growing evidence suggests they should focus time and resources on cross-mobile-device applications. The problem is that with so many mobile devices and operating systems in play, IT just can't build for even a sampling, never mind the whole lot.

Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won't see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about 264 million euros, or approximately $410 million.

TechCrunch IT are reporting that Nokia has bought Symbian Ltd, the software development company famous for creating the proprietary operating system for mobile devices, Symbian OS.

The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) is always a highlight of the year for the mobile sector but this year's show was also a big one for open source software. Traditionally in a market dominated by proprietary operating systems there has been a significant shift towards open source software by mobile phone makers over the past year.

While Google and its Open Handset Alliance partners would have us believe that it's all about the customer, the Android open source mobile platform is as much about preventing Microsoft, Symbian and Palm from taking up the top position in the mobile operating system space.

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks.