Symbian Foundation adds Visa, ARM, and Huawei to its roster

Today the Symbian Foundation, the organization that will be the caretaker of the Symbian OS as well as the UIQ and S60 user interfaces that run atop it, announced the addition of 12 new members to its ranks. Notable among the new members are credit card company Visa, chip maker ARM, and Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Huawei.

Since the Symbian Foundation^(INFO) was formed in June of this year, 52 companies have joined. The Symbian Foundation was formed by Nokia after it indicated that it was going to buy out all other stakes in Symbian and turn the OS and its user interfaces into open source, which means that it will be available to any manufacturer royalty free, just as is the case with Google's Android OS.

Nokia says that the first unified Symbian OS release will be out next year, and it told Reuters that it expects to have a completely new platform available in 2010. [via PhoneScoop]