Symbian foundations has just announced it: Symbian^3 is now fully open source. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device, a microwave heater or anything you want.

IDC forecasts that worldwide shipments of smartphones, will surpass 390 million units, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.9% for the 2009–2013 period. In a market that was once dominated by a handful of pioneers, such as BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, newcomers touting open standards and intuitive design and navigation have garnered strong end-user and handset vendor interest.

Symbian Exchange and Exposition, the new name for the Symbian Smartphone Show, has started this morning at Earl's Court, London. With no almost no news and a significantly smaller expo, this looks a bit frightening for Symbian and its community.

Nokia has just released the first Beta of Qt 4.6.0, which includes the port to the Symbian platform with integration for the S60 framework. The focus of this release has been to stabilize the Symbian port, as well as adding a backend for the Phonon multimedia library enabling simple audio and video playback.

BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 were designed years ago – the traditional strengths of these software platforms are rapidly becoming liabilities in the fast-paced smartphone market. Michael Vakulenko answers a critical question: are user interface face-lifts, application stores or even going open source enough for the legacy smartphone platforms to stand-up to the challenges posed by iPhone and Android?

N97 is now available on Nokia Remote Device Access facility. I have taken the opportunity to use this to run a small "Phone Information" utility we use at NewLC (and that we will deliver to you soon) and here are a few figures that might be of interest.

There are some very interesting details in the Reviewing the Release Plan post from David Wood about the future of the Symbian platform. The biggest news for me is the switch to Qt in Symbian^4...

According to eWeek, the Symbian Foundation is working on an "application inventory" where developers will not be charged a fee or percentage to distribute their applications via the foundation's channel.

Nokia has just released a beta version of the N97 SDK. This SDK is suitable for C/C++, Java, WebRuntime and Python development. It introduce a dedicated emulator with N97 look and feel as well as new APIs available on this particular device.