As Nokia Corp. is reportedly trying to stop development its own Symbian operating system and then transit its smartphones to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone 7 to cut costs by making massive reductions of headcount, Intel Corp. plans to establish a new research and development (R&D) in Finland, which will naturally allow it to absorb the personnel.

A decrease in research and development operations is set to be announced by the end of April, with as many as 6000 jobs under threat, said Antti Rinne of Pro, Finland’s biggest private-sector office-worker union, reports Bloomberg news-agency. That would be equivalent to 38%  of the Finnish company’s global devices R&D workforce. Nokia, however, declined to make any official statements.

While Nokia presumably fires, Intel Corp. seemingly hires. According to a report by Reuters news-agency, the world's largest chipmaker plans to establish an R&D site in Finland and hire approximately 200 engineers particularly at the time when Nokia is about to unveil large job cuts. Intel reportedly confirmed that it had started hiring, but the R&D center was yet to be established.

Intel is interested in ex-Nokia staff as it co-developed MeeGo operating system with the company, which now plans to abandon it almost completely in favour of Microsoft Windows Phone. The world's largest chipmaker still wants to continue developing the OS in order to install it onto tablet devices powered by Atom-featuring system-on-chip products.

Google, Samsung and Skype have reportedly indicated that they were seeking to the former Nokia engineers looking for new jobs following Nokia's announcement regarding plans to transit to WP7.

Tags: Intel, Nokia, MeeGo, Samsung, Skype, Google