The Symbian Foundation may struggle to maintain momentum in the fast evolving mobile application market, and risks seeing developers and operators adopt rival platforms, say experts.

Spearheaded by Nokia and Symbian (set to become a wholly owned Nokia subsidiary), the Symbian Foundation has pledged to merge Symbian, S60 (Nokia), UIQ (Sony Ericsson) and MOAP-S (NTT Docomo) mobile operating systems into a single open source framework.

The new platform is designed to speed up application development, simplify platform choices for mobile operators, and stimulate user demand for new mobile devices and applications.

Various open source components will be released under a royalty-free Eclipse licence over the next two years, a timeline that leaves rival Linux-based LiMO Foundation, Android (Google), Microsoft and Apple platforms with plenty of opportunity to erode Symbian’s current 57 per cent market share.

Gartner research analyst Carolina Milanesi said Symbian Foundation members must work hard to convince mobile operators its platform is real.

“They need to be quite aggressive because Android is due in late 2008 or early 2009. In theory they can start developing now, but the whole open source toolkit will not be ready until 2010 and it remains to be seen how much they can do between now and then,” she said.

Symbian chief executive Nigel Clifford said: “There are seven million lines of code in Symbian and we need to respect the other platforms in this model and be very careful how we document development.”