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Nokia on Tuesday announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, which develops an operating system for mobile phones. The Finnish phone giant currently owns about 48 percent and will pay €264 million ($410 million) for the rest. It has received thumbs up from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications, and Siemens, which represents about 91 percent of the Symbian shares subject to the offer, according to a statement from Nokia.
Samsung Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, hasn’t commented yet, but Nokia said it expects the company to agree to the sale. The deal doesn’t come as a surprise to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. "Nokia paid out more than $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy Symbian for about $410 million, rather than keep paying what is effectively a subsidy to the other shareholders," Blaber wrote in a company blog.

View: The full story @ Infoworld

On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February 24 to May 12 is a nanotechnology-equipped concept mobile device.

The Morph is the result of an ongoing partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge, and illustrates their ideas of how future devices will look and function. It’s a multipurpose unit with context-dependent shape; so whatever its intended use may be at the time, it can be structurally modified to fit the user’s needs.

Nokia’s partnership with the University of Cambridge began in 2007 and encompasses different projects in several areas. While these initial developments come from the nanoscience center and electrical division of the engineering department at Cambridge, other groups will be included in upcoming projects.

Nokia, in typically forward-thinking fashion, said it expects certain features shown in the Morph demo to be integrated into handheld devices within seven years.

Source: BetaNews