| Symbian OS | Symbian Phones | Developer | Partner | Operator | News & Events | About Us |
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CEO: Nigel Clifford
Offices:
Symbian’s headquarters are based in London, United Kingdom, with offices in the United Kingdom, United States and Asia (Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo)
Founded: 1998
Number of employees: 1409
Shareholders:
Ericsson (15.6%), Nokia (47.9%), Panasonic (10.5%), Samsung (4.5%), Siemens (8.4%) and Sony Ericsson (13.1%)
The product: Symbian OS™
Core business:
Symbian creates and licenses Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for mobile phones
User interfaces designed for Symbian OS include Nokia’s S60, NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP user interface for the FOMA™ 3G network and UIQ, designed by UIQ Technology, a joint venture between Motorola and Sony Ericsson
Licensees:Mobile phone manufacturers that shipped Symbian smartphones in Q4 2007 are Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Motorola, Mitsubishi Electric, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson
As of 31 December 2007:
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2007 |
Symbian announces new technologies for the future of converged device development including FreeWay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) |
| 2006 | 100 million Symbian smartphones shipped |
| 2005 | Symbian OS v9 announced with Platform Security and support for single core processors, WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari™ browser |
| 2004 | Symbian OS selected by NTT DoCoMo as software platform for 3G FOMA™ handsets |
| 2003 | Symbian smartphones support mobile payments in Japan, first Motorola smartphone on UIQ A920, Samsung becomes a shareholder |
| 2002 | First smartphone on UIQ – Sony Ericsson P800, Siemens and Sony Ericsson become shareholders |
| 2001 | First open Symbian smartphone - Nokia 9210 Communicator - and first GPRS, camera smartphone - Nokia 7650 |
| 2000 | First touch-screen phone - Ericsson R380 on Symbian OS v5 |
| 1999 | Symbian and NTT DoCoMo sign R&D agreement to develop smartphones for Japan, Matsushita (Panasonic) becomes a shareholder |
| 1998 | Symbian founded by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion |
| Dec 2007 | Symbian smartphones selling through more than 250 major network operators worldwide |
| Feb 2007 | Telefónica Móviles España selects Symbian OS for future roll-out of smartphones and services |
| Feb 2007 | Telecom Italia selects S60 software on Symbian OS |
| Feb 2007 | Nokia announced a collaboration to strengthen T-Mobile's capabilities to bring core services to market and improve the capability of S60 licensees to develop devices for T-Mobile |
| Nov 2006 | 3 launches the X-Series first for devices based on UIQ and S60 on Symbian OS |
| Oct 2006 | Orange specified S60 on Symbian OS as a platform of choice to accelerate Orange device customization, shorten time-to-market and accelerate application development |
| Oct 2006 | AT&T formerly known as Cingular Wireless launched Symbian Zone on Cingular devCentral to provide Cingular Deluxe developers with early online access to the latest Symbian OS library for application developers |
| Feb 2006 | Vodafone and Nokia collaborate to increase the use of S60 on Symbian OS as a standard software platform |
| Nov 2004 | NTT DoCoMo selects Symbian OS as one of its primary smartphone development platforms |
The following information is based on analyst house independent research and statistics.
"Vendors are measuring success in the smart device market on their ability to drive consumption of rich media content and applications for the consumer. The scale of the opportunity is immense with Strategy Analytics predictingthat in 2008 and 2009 combined, 500 million smart devices will be sold globally, more than have been sold cumulatively since the beginning of the decade. This growth will be heavily dependent on selling these rich media smart devices to consumers who are still discovering the value in these devices beyond messaging. Device vendors who win the lion's share of these sales will successfully raise the bar in the areas of content usability and presentation while leveraging the broadband capabilities of 3G technologies. While other OS suppliers have their niche, none is further in serving this wider market than Symbian. With technologies such as ScreenPlay and Freeway, Symbian OS will enable the consumption of rich media on smart devices for the next generation of consumer demand." Chris Ambrosio, Strategy Analytics, Jan 2008.
"Because of the value users are finding, organizations are slowly taking ownership of smartphones and data applications used for business purposes. Rather than having over complicated reimbursement plans, more organizations are finding it more expedient and economical to treat wireless voice and data services as a business expense when they use smartphones." Bill Hughes, In-Stat, Nov 2007.
"Smartphone platform vendors' continuing investment in performance and cost optimization, developer and integration tools, and innovative licensing models has tipped the mass-market volume inflection point. Symbian has led this trend. At the current rate of innovation and proliferation, the open OS segment will surpass the 1 billion cumulative sell-through mark by 2011. At this time, smartphones will comprise over 20% of all handset volumes.
It's increasingly obvious that proprietary, or organically incubated OS platform strategies are far too costly and time consuming for vendors to develop in a market where cellular and consumer electronics, and the enterprise and consumer applications they support, are becoming one. Symbian OS boasts proven commercial success across form factors, segments, and use cases. It is almost a certainty that Symbian will continue to leading this trend due to its stability, maturity, strong global presence and growing vendor support. Still, between RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, and a host of Linux providers, the market is not zero-sum. Yankee believes the primary growth driver for smartphones is the economic benefit to manufacturers and operators associated with standardized, scalable software architectures. The best platforms will anticipate the multi-faceted nature of the demand side, which includes both operators and consumers. Vendors and operators will enjoy rapid time to market at low cost with services and devices that span the entirety of the market, from basic phones to ultra-high multimedia centric models." John Jackson, Vice President, Enabling Technologies Research, Yankee Group, Jan 2008
Analyst firm Canalys forecasts that cumulative global shipments of smartphones will pass the one billion mark by 2012. "We are still at an early stage of market development, with businesses and consumers only scratching the surface of what is and will be possible with such devices.” With the rapid increase in demand for new features and services, smartphones are migrating into the higher volume, mid-range market segments. Symbian accessed this market successfully in 2006 and increased its volume of smartphones selling at mid-range prices*. In Q406 4.5 million Symbian smartphones shipped at mid-range price points, an 86% share of the mid-range smartphone market.” Pete Cunningham, senior analyst at Canalys.
* Includes Linux 'closed' phones in Asia and excludes PDAs
[1] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21053908
[2] http://www.strategyanalytics.net/default.aspx?mod
[3] IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, December 2007
[4] IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, December 2007
[5] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/22results.html
[6] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/01/22results.html
[7] http://www.rim.com/news/press/2007/pr-20_12_2007-01.shtml
[8] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[9] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics – Worldwide Smart Mobile Device Market
[10] http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9816072-7.html
New Symbian Ready technology validation program
Symbian wins two Queen's Awards for Enterprise in the areas of Innovation and International Trade
FOMA SH705ii, based on Symbian OS, launched in Japan