Seven companies have joined Nokia's Symbian alliance which aims to further develop and popularize mobile platform in the face of growing competition from rival operating systems.

Symbian OS

The Symbian Foundation announced over the weekend that Borqs, Comarch, HiQ, Kanrikougaku Kenkyusho Ltd. (K3), L&T Infotech, Renesas Technology Corp. and SoftBank Mobile Corp. have joined its ranks prior to a meeting in Tokyo, Japan.

Softbank is Japan's third-largest mobile carrier.

The seven new members bring to 59 the number of groups supporting The Symbian Foundation.

The Nokia-led group claims that the Symbian OS is now used in 150 countries in over 50 languages.

The Symbian Foundation hopes to release a completely-new, open-source and royalty-free Symbian platform by 2010.

Other alliance members include: phone and device makers Fujitsui, Huawei, LG, Samsung, Sharp, SonyEricsson; and network operators 3, America Movil, AT&T, KTF, Orange, NTT DoCoMo, T-Mobile, Tim and Vodafone.