If you haven't seen the news already, there are big moves afoot in Symbian-land. Nokia has made a cash offer to buy the shares of its partners in Symbian Limited, offering around 264 million Euros in total. Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens have already accepted.

Alongside that, Nokia has established something called the Symbian Foundation, with founder partners including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

The simple way of portraying this is an effort to make Symbian a stronger competitor for rival platforms like Android, LiMo and the iPhone. That certainly seems to be the gist of Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo's comments:

"Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation," he says.

"We will drive efficient, open innovation by unifying the platform and simplifying the software supply chain, leveraging our experience from mobile devices."

This'll include uniting Symbian, S60, UIQ and DoCoMo's MOAP platform in one "unified platform with common UI framework", which will be available to all members of the new Foundation under a royalty-free licence.

That's the general gist, anyway, with tech sites already running with the idea of Symbian as "an open-source Android killer". But what does it mean for gaming? Will the new unified platform go further than Symbian has in attracting mobile games publishers?

"It is a very interesting move," says Julian Jones of Ideaworks3D, the UK-based developer that's focused on native platforms. "This should reduce Symbian UI fragmentation, and our Airplay technology will fully support all updates to the Symbian operating system."

The idealist in me wonders whether the Symbian Foundation now makes it more likely that Nokia could roll out its N-Gage mobile games service for other manufacturers' handsets, too. But the company appears to have its hands full making N-Gage work on its own phones for now, so perhaps not.