Symbian, the mobile operating system that is currently maintained by Accenture, had actually finished 2011 stronger than it started in the past year. Symbian is still the number one mobile operating system, which is ahead of Android, iOS, BlackBerry, etc. Below is a chart that tracks the figures of the mobile operating system market share put together by Pingdom.

The Symbian Foundation said that they are shutting down their websites and the online distribution of their source code as of December 17, 2010. Nokia will be taking over the development of Symbian and will package code either on DVD drives or USB drives that developers need to order through them. A packaged kit is not expected to arrive until January 31st and there may be a shipping cost associated with it.

WordPress has launched an application for Nokia Symbian^3. This is the fourth largest mobile platform that the blogging company launch an app for after launching on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The application was written in Qt, which means that it will work on the Nokia N8, The Nokia C7, and the Nokia C6-01. Features include the ability to post on the go, moderate comments, check statistics, and photo uploading. [IntoMobile]

Even though Symbian is being dropped from mobile device companies left and right, the European Commission wants the company to keep up with the development of the operating system. The initiative, sponsored by the EC and endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, advocates Symbian as a unique technology that is necessary for European-centric mobile software development. This resulted in over €22million in funding for the Symbian platform. The development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation and includes 24 organizations across 8 countries in Europe. The consortium of these organizations is being called SYMBEOSE (Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe). [Symbian Blog]

Lee Williams, the executive director at Symbian has left the company for “personal reasons.” Before Symbian, Williams worked at Motorola and Palm. Williams is being replaced by Symbian CFO Tim Holbrow. Williams’ departure comes at a time when Samsung has ended their support for the mobile operating system and Nokia announced that the N8 will be the last Symbian-powered N Series Device. [Engadget]

Samsung has sent out an e-mail to registered developers that they will be closing the Symbian forums and will be removing all Symbian content by the end of the year. Samsung has been busy working on their Bada operating system to replace Symbian. Symbian is one of Nokia’s mobile open source operating systems for mobile devices and smartphones. According to a Gartner report from 2009, Symbian accounted for about 46.9% of smartphone sales. [Engadget]

Nokia is transitioning towards ending the N Series Symbian-powered devices.  Nokia is preparing to grow MeeGo after the N8 introduction.  Symbian will continue to remain around and Symbian^4 is on the way. [Engadget]

Samsung Electronics will quit using Symbian in favor of their own in-house open operating system according to SVP Don Joo Lee. Samsung plans to continue using the Windows Mobile and Android operating systems too. This year Samsung shipped roughly 200 million mobile devices. This number is expected to increase by 10-20% in 2010.

Bada will support applications made by developers using Samsung’s software development kit. “Bada” means ocean in Korean. While details about a Bada application store has not been fleshed out, we do know that Samsung plans to integrate the Bada store will be integrated with their European app store.