Photo by Daniel Cheong

Om Malik has a great post up digesting today’s news that Nokia is going all in on Symbian Limited, saying there’s three players now in mobile phones — and Google ain’t one of them.

Noting that today anyone can make mobile phones using off-the-shelf components and factories in Asia, Malik argues the future of mobile computing and communications will focus almost entirely on design, user experience and software. He likens the mobile phone business to the PC business - which Microsoft dominates with its Windows platform -  and says the winners in the handset market will depend a lot on the software developers creating apps for mobile platforms.

According to Malik, “In this platform game, the winner is going to be the one that can attract the most developers,” and the problem, for Nokia and some of the Symbian Fondation’s other members (among them, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone) is they are backing a confusing array of platforms, including Linux.