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We've regularly speculated what would eventually happen to Symbian, but I must admit that the scenario where Nokia acquired outright ownership, wrapped it up with S60, UIQ and MOAP(S), then open-sourced the entire thing did not appear within our top 10 outcomes.

In case you missed the specifics of the transaction through all yesterday's fireworks: Nokia has offered €3.65 per share for the 52% of Symbian it does not already own, amounting to a purchase price of about £210 million (sorry for switching to sterling, but you'll see why later on). The Finnish giant will then take the three commercially available Symbian UI variants - Nokia's own S60, UIQ from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, and NTT DoCoMo's MOAP(S) - combine them with the Symbian OS, creating a complete open-source software platform. The platform will be available royalty-free from an independent organisation known as the 'Symbian Foundation'. The current Foundation members are AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

At first glance, the transaction looks expensive for Nokia which, at £210 million for 52% of the company, values Symbian at £400 million. However, this is spectacularly cheap and is a far cry away from the multi-billion dollar price-tag that was brandished about for the operating system start-up during the smartphone glory-days of 2002-2004.

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