HEXUS.sharewatch: Nokia falls as Symbian wind-down continues

Despite the growing seriousness of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, stock markets seem to have been relatively stable last week. However, if Portugal has to do an Ireland this week, we expect thing - in Europe at least - to get a lot more volatile.

One of Europe's few tech giants - mobile phone maker Nokia - was the biggest faller on our list, despite not having any bad news along the lines of the N8 bricking story we brought you a couple of weeks ago.

One key development, which we suspect contributed to the loss of investor confidence, was the next stage in the atrophy of the Symbian operating system. Having bought out its partners in what remains the world's biggest smartphone OS by volume, Nokia moved Symbian to the open source model, presumably in the hope that a greater number of developers would improve the OS and provide more apps.

But not only have Nokia's former Symbian partners defected en masse to Android, it looks like developers have come to the same conclusion. As a result the Symbian Foundation has been given a greatly reduced role as a licensing body and, yesterday, the Foundation announced all its websites would be shut down on 17 December. I.e. no more open-source goodness.