The Symbian mobile OS is used by millions of phones globally and thanks to a (now corrected) oversight they could have potentially installed malware - with Symbian's approval.

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.

Android will trail only Symbian in mobile phone market share by 2013, according to IDC. Android phones such as the pictured Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which is now heading for NTT DoCoMo, will grow 150.4 percent to 68.0 million units by 2013, but other Linux-based phones will struggle, says IDC.

Six Japanese technology firms have announced they are developing a new application platform for mobile phones that will be compatible with Linux, Symbian, and possibly Android. Developed by NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp, the unnamed, multimedia-focused mobile platform is scheduled for arrival in phones in early 2012, say the partners.

One of the major themes that emerged from this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was Linux, with new Linux-based handset platforms on show and various applications and services for mobile Linux. Could this mean that Linux is likely to be a major rival for other mobile operating systems such as Symbian?

In one of the first posts on the Symbian Foundation’s new blog the following proclamation was made about the future of Nokia’s proprietary S60 mobile operating system:
“We’re going to give it all away: For free”.
It’s now almost a year later and I have to ask: What’s taking you so long?

Symbian is the famous operating system that power up most Nokia mobile handsets. This OS was originally developed by Symbian Ltd. but then Nokia claimed it, next to an independent non-profit organization called Symbian Foundation, and implemented it on its devices.

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.

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.