Related non-mobile-phone systems
Car phone
A type of telephone permanently mounted in a vehicle, these often have more powerful transmitters, an external antenna and loudspeaker for handsfree use. They usually connect to the same networks as regular mobile phones.
Cordless telephone (portable phone)
Cordless phones are telephones which use one or more radio handsets in place of a wired handset. The handsets connect wirelessly to a base station, which in turn connects to a conventional land line for calling. Unlike mobile phones, cordless phones use private base stations (belonging to the land-line subscriber), and which are not shared.
Professional Mobile Radio
Advanced professional mobile radio systems can be very similar to mobile phone systems. Notably, the IDEN standard has been used as both a private trunked radio system as well as the technology for

The mobile phone became a mass media channel in 1998 when the first ringing tones were sold to mobile phones by Radiolinja in Finland. Soon other media content appeared such as news, videogames, jokes, horoscopes, TV content and advertising. In 2006 the total value of mobile phone paid media content exceeded internet paid media content and was worth 31 Billion dollars (source Informa 2007). The value of music on phones was worth 9.3 Billion dollars in 2007 and gaming was worth over 5 billion dollars in 2007 (source Netsize Guide 2008 [10]).
The mobile phone is often called the Fourth Screen (if counting cinema, TV and PC screens as the first three) or Third Screen (counting only TV and PC screens). It is also called the Seventh of the Mass Media (with Print, Recordings, Cinema, Radio, TV and Internet the first six). Most early content for mobile tended to be copies of legacy media, such as the banner advertisement or the TV news highlight video clip. Recently unique content for mobile has been emerging, from the ringing tones and ringback tones in music to "mobisodes," video content that has been produced exclusively for mobile phones.
The advent of media on the mobile phone has also produced the opportunity to identify and track Alpha Users or Hubs, the most influential members of any social community. AMF Ventures measured in 2007

Mobile phones generally obtain power from batteries, which can be recharged from a USB port, from portable batteries, from mains power or a cigarette lighter socket in a car using an adapter (often called battery charger or wall wart) or from a solar panel or a dynamo (that can also use a USB port to plug the phone).
Formerly, the most common form of mobile phone batteries were nickel metal-hydride, as they have a low size and weight. Lithium-Ion batteries are sometimes used, as they are lighter and do not have the voltage depression that nickel metal-hydride batteries do. Many mobile phone manufacturers have now switched to using lithium-Polymer batteries as opposed to the older Lithium-Ion, the main advantages of this being even lower weight and the possibility to make the battery a shape other than strict cuboid. Mobile phone manufacturers have been experimenting with alternative power sources, including solar cells.

Mobile payments were first trialled in Finland in 1998 when two Coca-Cola vending machines in Espoo were enabled to work with SMS payments. Eventually the idea spread and in 1999 the Philippines launched the first commercial mobile payments systems, on the mobile operators Globe and Smart. Today mobile payments ranging from mobile banking to mobile credit cards to mobile commerce are very widely used in Asia and Africa, and in selected European markets. For example in the Philippines it is not unusual to have one's entire paycheck paid to the mobile account. In Kenya the limit of money transfers from one mobile banking account to another is one million US dollars. In India paying utility bills with mobile gains a 5% discount. In Estonia the government found criminals collecting cash parking fees, so the government declared that only mobile payments via SMS were valid for parking and today all parking fees in Estonia are handled via mobile and the crime involved in the activity has vanished.
Mobile Applications are developed using the Six M's (previously Five M's) service-development theory created by the author Tomi Ahonen with Joe Barrett of Nokia and Paul Golding of Motorola. The Six M's are Movement (location), Moment (time), Me (personalization), Multi-user (community), Money (payments) and Machines (automation). The Six M's / Five M's theory is widely referenced in the telecoms applications literature and used by most major industry players. The first book to discuss the theory was Services for UMTS by Ahonen & Barrett in 2002.

The iPhone has revolutionized applications for mobile phones, allowing a vast array of applications that perform hundreds of different tasks to be easily downloaded and installed through the App Store, a native application on the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod touch. Using a WiFi, EDGE or 3G connection, users can purchase applications (some are free) from the App Store and download them directly to the phone. Apps can also be downloaded from the iTunes Store and synced with the iPhone/iPod once the device is synced with iTunes. The App Store was developed by Apple to interface with the AT&T cellular network. T-Mobile is also developing their own version of the App Store, most likely to interface with their newest smart phone, the T-Mobile G1, the first phone built running the new Google Android cellular firmware, which was likely built as a competitor for the iPhone

Main article: Mobile phone features
Mobile phones often have features beyond sending text messages and making voice calls, including Internet browsing, music (MP3) playback, memo recording, personal organiser functions, e-mail, instant messaging, built-in cameras and camcorders, ringtones, games, radio, Push-to-Talk (PTT), infrared and Bluetooth connectivity, call registers, ability to watch streaming video or download video for later viewing, video calling and serving as a wireless modem for a PC, and soon will also serve as a console of sorts to online games and other high quality games. The total value of mobile data services exceeds the value of paid services on the Internet, and was worth 31 billion dollars in 2006 (source Informa).[citation needed] The largest categories of mobile services are music, picture downloads, videogaming, adult entertainment, gambling, video/TV

Nokia is currently the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, with a global device market share of approximately 40% in 2008. Other major mobile phone manufacturers (in order of market share) include Samsung (14%), Motorola (14%), Sony Ericsson (9%) and LG (7%).[7] These manufacturers account for over 80% of all mobile phones sold and produce phones for sale in most countries.
Other manufacturers include Apple Inc., Audiovox (now UTStarcom), Benefon, BenQ-Siemens, CECT, High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC), Fujitsu, Kyocera, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Neonode, Panasonic, Palm, Matsushita, Pantech Wireless Inc., Philips, Qualcomm Inc., Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), Sagem, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Sendo, Sierra Wireless, SK Teletech, Sonim Technologies,Spice, T&A Alcatel, Huawei, Trium and Toshiba. There are also specialist communication systems related to (but distinct from) mobile phones.
There are several categories of mobile phones, from basic phones to feature phones such as musicphones and cameraphones, to smartphones. The first smartphone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996 which incorporated PDA functionality to the basic mobile phone at the time. As miniaturisation and increased processing power of microchips has enabled ever more features to be added to phones, the concept of the smartphone has evolved, and what was a high-end smartphone five years ago, is a standard phone today. Several phone series have been introduced to address a given market segment, such as the RIM BlackBerry focusing on enterprise/corporate customer email needs; the SonyEricsson Walkman series

Main article: History of mobile phones
In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued in to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood.[2] Cells for mobile phone base stations were invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been available since 1973. A patent for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969.

A mobile phone (also known as a handphone,[1] wireless phone, cell phone, cellular phone, cellular telephone or cell telephone) is a long-range, electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. In addition to the standard voice function of a mobile phone, telephone, current mobile phones may support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, gaming, Bluetooth, infrared, camera with video recorder and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video, MP3 player, radio and GPS. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception is satellite phones

The whole two-year process feels like a traditional corporate engineering culture trying to manage change around a well established product space. This would be great if this was what Symbian Ltd. was to remain (but even then it risks being a dead-end overtaken by other solutions with the coming mobile Internet wave). When IBM began the Eclipse Project, they put safe IP structures around a software base, some simple governance and a road map in place, and got on with the work. Later, the Eclipse Foundation was created as a better way to manage the inbound innovation and growth under a well defined IP regime. Now, the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla Corp. provide excellent blueprints for what the Symbian Foundation needs to be. Nokia already has the inhouse experience to build from those blueprints. Engineering cultural change is difficult but essential here. While one wouldn't expect Symbian Ltd. to release its core assets while awaiting regulatory approval, there have to be other complementary software assets internally available that could be released as early experiments to begin to get the IT structure in place and begin the cultural learning. Two years gives Android and LiMo and even Windows Mobile too much time to erode a community that should rightly be coming to the Symbian Foundation.

"Backwards compatibility" as an absolute goal. This is not a bad thing per se, but it feels like the backwards compatibility requirement exists to deal with a long delivery cycle — essentially asking developers to begin developing today for the open source platform delivery in two years and the promise that the investment will be protected. All complex dynamic software hits a point in its evolution where a re-write is required. (The Linux kernel rewrote the entire VM and scheduler after about 10 years of evolution with modern architectures.) Backwards compatibility becomes the challenge. But the opportunity forward MUST be bigger than the backwards compatibility option. It needs to be managed in the community, i.e. this is a community issue and a delivery time-line issue. Think of the opportunity that Microsoft took moving from the Windows world of the late nineties to the new world enabled by NT. Think of the enormous opportunity Apple took moving from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX. Think of developing a community of innovation forward like the Mozilla world and Eclipse

While the foundation is open to all, and the list of membership benefits is well defined today (in the white paper), one of the benefits reads: Right to access and modify foundation source code, and contribute code to the foundation. This needs to be rethought along the lines of how the Eclipse Foundation manages committers and contributors. The Symbian Foundation is deliberately cutting off unknown sources of contribution if they make it a membership benefit. There is no loss of control in encouraging (and vetting) contributions from as wide a population as possible. Putting gates around the community early, or discouraging contributors looks arrogant and risks the community's participation and growth at precisely the time when it is most needed. Microsoft certainly demonstrated how fast you could pour cold water on a community with the Rotor project. Motorola had its early Linux community vanish. Heavy-handed control and "we know best" attitudes hampered the early critical growth of the OpenSolaris community. Who knows what sources of innovation will be cut off (and will defect to other projects) with this gate in place.

Most of this is fantastic news. The economics of code sharing, value preservation of the intellectual asset, and innovation capture will be delivered through the foundation with the primary stakeholders sharing the costs. This is a perfect example of the economics of shared development in this particular market space and "why open source software."
Organization and governance of the new Foundation will be key. The foundation is open to all and membership will cost US$1500. The primary board members will share all the operational costs. This seems a reasonable way to manage the cost — it's likely much cheaper than historical royalty payments and it scales well versus a fixed premium membership fee structure seen in other places. The white paper describes the functioning of the foundation based on the following structure.

The previous post looked at the Nokia acquisition of Symbian from the competitive perspective. Let's now look at the opportunities and challenges for Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation. Remember that assuming successful regulatory approval, there will be no Symbian Ltd. anymore. Nokia will need to manage the challenges that come with any acquisition. When you buy a company, you essentially acquire the assets (in this case the software), the intellectual capital of the employees, and the customers.
This acquisition is particularly interesting as key Symbian Ltd. shareholders and customers have banded together to deliver the primary software assets into a not-for-profit organization. There's a great white paper outlining the initial strategy on the currently minimalist Symbian Foundation site.