Symbian to support universal synchronization standards

Symbian joins IBM, Lotus, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Palm Computing and Starfish software in promoting SyncML initiative

LONDON, UK - February 22, 2000 - It was announced today that Symbian is to support SyncML, an industry initiative that promotes interoperability of data synchronization between PC's, corporate and web servers, Wireless Information Devices and other mobile devices.

The initial sponsors of the initiative are IBM, Lotus, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Palm Computing, and Starfish Software. Symbian will work with these and other companies to define the initial version of the SyncML specification, which is expected to be ready for public release later this year.

"Symbian is working with the world's leading computing and telecommunications companies to create standards that will drive a mass market of Smartphones and Communicators," said Juha Christensen, Executive Vice President, Symbian. "SyncML addresses the need for users to easily access data on the move. For the first time we will have a common standard that is device and network independent - consumers will be able to access and share their data regardless of where it is stored."

SyncML is designed to be a common industry specification that will solve major bottlenecks in current mobile computing systems and more importantly, will enable new class of services and benefits for consumers. Personal information, such as email, calendars, web calendars, to-do lists, contact information and other relevant data, will be consistently accessed, no matter where the information is stored, making it easily accessible for users on the move. For example, a user could read e-mail from either a Smartphone or PC, and still maintain a consistent, updated record of which messages had been read.

The SyncML specifications leverage the Extensible Markup Language (XML) industry standard for representation of structured data. This text markup standard is rapidly becoming the common method for representing Internet data. SyncML intends to use XML as the common format for representing data synchronization of these web-based documents. In addition, the SyncML initiative intends to leverage other industry standards such as MIME for representing email information, the vCard, for representing contact information and iCalendar, for representing calendaring and scheduling information. Further information of SyncML membership process, technical specification and other information is available at 
SyncML

About Symbian

Symbian owns, licenses, develops and supports leading software, user interfaces, application frameworks and development tools for Wireless Information Devices such as Communicators and Smartphones. Symbian aims to promote standards for the interoperability of Wireless Information Devices with wireless networks, content services, and messaging and enterprise wide solutions.

With headquarters in London, Symbian has offices in Tokyo and Kanazawa, Japan; Ronneby, Sweden; Cambridge, UK and San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia and Psion.
Symbian

Media Enquiries

Please direct enquiries to: Symbian +44 207 154 1383 press@symbian.com	Karen Kazanjian Lotus 617 693 7386 karen_kazanjian@lotus.com
Tapio Hedman Nokia Mobile Phones + 358 10 5051 tapio.hedman@nokia.com	Julia Rodriguez Palm, Inc. 408 326 9390 julia_rodriguez@palm.com
Anthony Garvey Psion PLC +44 171 317 4265 anthony-garvey@psion.com	Tara Sexton IBM 914 766 3366 tara.sexton@us.ibm.com
Jennifer Weyrauch Motorola 847 523 0015 jennifer.weyrauch@motorola.com	Megan Matthews Nokia, Inc 972 894 4267 megan.matthews@nokia.com
Amy Nemechek A&R Partners Public Relations 303 730 5755 Anemechek@arpartners.com	Kate Dueck Starfish Software 831 461 5815 kate.dueck@starfish.com