Lee Williams to head up Symbian Foundation

Lee Williams will take up his new role at the Symbian Foundation on 1 January

Lee Williams, currently head of Nokia's S60 organisation, has been nominated as executive director of the Symbian Foundation by the 10 initial board members.

Members of the Symbian Foundation, namely AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, all voted to instate Williams as the leader of the soon-to-be-launched organisation.

"I feel honoured to have been invited to serve in this role. This is a great opportunity to directly help deliver on the promise of the Foundation, working with the stakeholders and prospective members who are so committed to make this initiative a success," said Williams.

"To me there can be no more exciting role in the mobile software world than to lead the Symbian Foundation."

Nokia formed the Symbian Foundation in June after announcing plans to buy Symbian outright. The Foundation continues to go from strength to strength, and now has the support of 52 companies.

The supporters comprise businesses across the sector, including eight device manufacturers, seven semiconductor companies, nine mobile network operators, 27 services and software companies and one financial services provider.

The Symbian acquisition is not yet complete, but all is currently on track and the deal is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Assuming there are no delays, Williams will take up his new role on 1 January. He will remain as head of the S60 organisation in Nokia's Devices business until he moves over.

Under Williams the Foundation is aiming to take parts of the Symbian OS and S60 from Nokia, along with UIQ technology from Motorola and Sony Ericsson and MOAP(S) from NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu, and combine them into a unified platform.

The first unified release is expected in 2009, and the Foundation aims to make the platform available in open source by June 2010.