Sharp, Opera join Symbian Foundation

The browser company Opera has signed up to the Symbian Foundation, a Nokia-led consortium that was set up in June to turn the Symbian mobile operating system into an open source platform.

The addition of Opera to the Symbian Foundation roster was announced on Tuesday, along with the involvement of companies including Acrodea, Brycen, HI Corporation, Ixonos, KTF, Sharp and TapRoot Systems. UIQ is also listed as a new member, despite the fact that the open source Symbian will effectively subsume the UIQ and Series 60 platforms — both of which are already based on Symbian.

"Symbian was one of the first companies to support Opera's vision of how the web one day would be available on any device," said Opera chief executive Jon von Tetzchner in Tuesday's statement. "Today, that vision is becoming reality. We look forward to the opportunity to join the foundation and help drive the ongoing evolution of the leading mobile operating system."

The last major slew of new Symbian Foundation members was announced in July, notably , including the mobile operator 3. Founding members included Nokia (which initiated the group when it bought out the remaining shares in Symbian that it did not already own), Symbian, Motorola, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

Also on Tuesday, Opera announced it was teaming up with Nvidia to build an optimised version of the Opera 9.5 browser into the graphics processor manufacturer's Tegra line of computer-on-a-chip processors, which are intended to find their way into Windows Mobile and Windows CE mobile-computing devices.