On the eve of T-Mobile’s public release of the first Android device, there is plenty of momentum growing behind an older, entrenched operating system that will soon be license free, too. Since June, 52 companies have announced plans to join the Symbian Foundation to gain free access to the OS, Reuters reports. The interest has been growing ever since Nokia (NYSE: NOK) made plans to buy out other shareholders’ stake in Symbian for $410 million and make the software open source. In 2009, the software will be available for free and Symbian will release a new version with the intention of launching an entirely new platform in two years.

While Symbian leads the smartphone OS race worldwide, it’s been getting a run for its money from the likes of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and now Google’s free and open-source Android platform. The OS’s market share hovered around 57 percent in mid 2008, but enjoyed 66 percent a year earlier. Will the simple lifting of license fees be enough to give Symbian a jolt in the face of increasingly popular touchscreen devices? It can’t help that the iPhone and Android’s first are coming from brands with high consumer-awareness points.

The handset manufacturers are doing what you’d expect: play the field and make sure they don’t miss any sudden shifts. On Monday, Samsung unveiled the i7110, a high-end Symbian smartphone with all the bells and whistles. The device runs on most current Symbian OS and packs an accelerometer, 3G, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, a 2.6-inch screen and a 5-megapixel camera into a slim candy-bar form factor, InformationWeek reports.