Nokia rocked the wireless industry June 24 with news it would purchase the portion of Symbian, a maker of mobile-phone software, that it didn’t already own — and thereupon give away the software for nothing.

The prospect of free software would surely lure users away from competing cell-phone software makers including Google, which in the past year threw its hat into the cell-phone software ring by spearheading the creation of Android, an operating system for wireless devices. Or so the argument runs.

But Nokia’s move may play right into Google’s hands, by helping to nurture a blossoming of the mobile Web and spur demand for all manner of cell-phone applications — and most vital, the ads sold by Google. “There’s nothing to say that that isn’t what Google’s plan was all along,” says Kevin Burden, research director, mobile devices at consultancy ABI Research. “They might have wanted a more open device environment anyway. that might have been

Opening the Airwaves

Google, which makes money from ads placed on Web pages and alongside search results, stands to benefit from anything that helps spread the use of the Web — be it on computers or the advanced cell phones known as smartphones that run Symbian software. With the desktop search market showing signs of slowing, the company needs to ramp up usage of its applications from mobile devices. U.S. mobile search ad sales are expected to rise to $1.4 billion in 2012 from $33.2 million in 2007, according to consulting firm Kelsey Group.

But in the U.S. market, Google has towering been hampered in getting its applications onto cell phones for a variety of reasons. To now, Web search on phones has been too slow or awkward, mobile goods plans and smartphones are often expensive, and carriers and cell-phone makers place restrictions on which…

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