Symbian group sees up to 700 members

BARCELONA (Reuters) - The Symbian Foundation, a consortium of companies around the most popular operating system in cellphones, expects to have as many as 700 members by the end of the year, the foundation's chief said in an interview.

So far, 78 companies have said they would join the foundation, slated to start operations in the first half of the year.

The open-source foundation inherits intellectual property from Nokia and other former shareholders of UK-based smartphone maker Symbian will distribute its first royalty-free software in April, Executive Director Lee Williams told Reuters.

Nokia bought out other shareholders of Symbian last year, and committed to give all its software to an independent foundation, which will develop it on an open-source basis.

"By the end of the year you'll see 400-700 members," Williams said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the wireless industry's biggest annual gathering.

Chipmaker Qualcomm, computer maker Hewlett-Packard and News Corp's social network MySpace were among latest new members who announced last week they would join the Symbian camp.

Williams said he was not unduly worried about the emergence of Google as a rival supplier of open-source software for mobile phones, saying Symbian's wide reach should ensure software developers continued to find it attractive.

To date, about 250 million Symbian phones have shipped worldwide, one third of those in the last 12-18 months, he said.

"Can they build and sustain a thriving ecosystem around their offering?" he asked. "Time will tell."

Google's Open Handset Alliance of companies supporting its Android mobile phone software currently has 47 members including Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC, Germany's T-Mobile and Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker.

Excitement in the industry had built up before the wireless fair in Barcelona at the prospect of several new Google phones being presented -- to date just one, HTC's G1 sold by T-Mobile is on the market.

But despite many companies saying they planned to build Google phones, only HTC -- with its new Magic phone that will be sold by Vodafone -- announced concrete plans.

Williams dismissed the idea of a "battle of operating systems" as over-dramatic. "It's an ecosystem battle, if there is one," he said.