As the support and demand for open source increased, the competition got tougher. With the Android practically knocking at out door, Nokia wants to make an entrance on the market and turn Symbian into an open source platform.

For the time being, Symbian is not an open source software. Instead, phone manufacturers are given parts of its source code.

The new announcement was made on Tuesday, when Nokia revealed its plan to buy the rest of the Symbian shares that it does not already own.

Together with partners such as Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone, Nokia is planning on turning the Symbian into an Android or Linux rival.

The goal of the Symbian Foundation is to make the Symbian OS “the most used platform in the world”, as they announced in the press conference.

Symbian owns over 65 percent of the smart mobile device market at the moment, and Nokia’s plans should put some pressure on the competition.

The announcement followed rumors that the Android headsets will not hit the market until the fourth quarter of 2008, due to the inability of some partners to meet the deadline as promised.

Another rival, Microsoft, isn’t scared however, and maintains its policy. Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for Microsoft’s mobile communications business, told Information Week: “In the short term, it doesn’t seem like it’s such a change.”

The Symbian project sounds good, but what everyone is expecting to see now is Nokia’s attitude towards its habit to control the software.

As Andrew Shikiar, director of global marketing for the LiMo Foundation told PC World, the challenge now is to change the profit-driven organization into a market-oriented one, capable of producing handsets that reflect the requirements and market demands.