Mobile phone maker Nokia announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire the 52-percent of mobile software specialist Symbian that it does not already own at an offer of €3.647 ($5.67) per share, in a cash deal valued at about €264 million, or $410 million.

In addition, Nokia and a number of other electronics makers are forming the Symbian Foundation to drive the development of Web applications for use by consumers on cell phones. The foundation plans to provide a unified platform that has a common user interface framework and that will be available for all foundation members under a royalty-free license.

Nokia said yesterday it had the agreement of its other partners in Symbian - LM Ericsson Telephone Co., Siemens AG and Panasonic - for the acquisition. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said it was reviewing the offer for its 4.5-per cent stake.

The Symbian Foundation will comprise a 10-person board split evenly between handset makers Nokia, LG Electronics Inc., Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung, and operators and wireless chipmakers AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone Group and STMicroelectronics NV.

The move comes as demand increases for smartphones and other advanced wireless devices, and as Nokia faces a growing challenge from Apple Inc's iPhone, a competing operating system from Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Research In Motion's Blackberry devices and Google's plan to create a suite of phones based on its mobile software platform, Android.

Calling it a ''bold, natural move for Symbian'', its CEO Nigel Clifford said that the combined ''vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet.''

"This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications," said Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in a statement. "The wide support for this initiative, uniting the industry around the Symbian platform, reflects the strong gravitational pull it has for application developers," he said.

Before this latest development, Symbian was privately-owned by Ericsson (15.6 per cent), Nokia (48 per cent), Matsushita / Panasonic (10.5 per cent), Siemens (6.3 per cent), Sony Ericsson (13.1 per cent) and Samsung (4.5 per cent).

The company develops and licenses Symbian OS, an operating system for advanced 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. User interface layers are provided by third parties. These include Series 60 and Series 80 by Nokia, UIQ from UIQ Technology and MOAP for NTT DoCoMo.
Already, some 200 million Symbian-based units have been shipped globally. On completion of the deal, Nokia will contribute its S60 user interface to the foundation, together with the UIQ interface developed by Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

The company's founder shareholders were Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita and Motorola. Motorola sold its stake in the company to Psion and Nokia in September 2003. Psion's stake was bought by Nokia, Matsushita, Siemens AG and Sony Ericsson in July 2004. While BenQ has acquired the mobile phone subsidiary of Siemens AG the Siemens AG stake in Symbian does not automatically pass to BenQ - this will need the approval of the Symbian Supervisory Board.

Much of Symbian's initial intellectual property came from the software arm of Psion PLC.

Nokia expects the transaction to complete during the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval, after which all Symbian employees will transfer to Nokia. On a reported basis, Nokia expects the deal to be dilutive in 2009, approximately break even in 2010, and accretive in 2011.