Symbian revamps developer network

Mobile OS developer Symbian, which was recently acquired by Nokia, launched a new partner program on Monday in a bid to stimulate development on the platform.

Symbian Partner Network (SPN) is intended to enable members of the Symbian ecosystem to develop and collaborate more closely on the platform.

As part of its reveamp of the platform, Symbian has dropped its annual membership fee for the partner network from $5,000 to $1,500. Mike Whittingham, vice president of Ecosystem Development at Symbian, said: “The new Symbian Partner Network program offers more value to our ever growing and vibrant ecosystem and supports the many services, application and content providers worldwide whose after-market products enhance the value of the Symbian platform”.

Last month, Finnish handset vendor Nokia snapped up the remaining 52.1 per cent of Symbian that it didn’t already own and united it with S60, UIQ and MOAP.

Analysts estimate Nokia paid out more than $250m in Symbian licence fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy up the mobile handset OS for about $410m, rather than keep paying a subsidy to other shareholders.

The newly created Symbian Foundation, with the backing of Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo, will also introduce an open source licence model for the Symbian operating system and the S60, UIQ and DoCoMo’s MOAP platforms.