Symbian introduces POSIX libraries on Symbian OS

P.I.P.S. - 'PIPS is POSIX on Symbian'- enables easy migration of desktop and server applications to smartphones

Beijing, China - 16 January 2007 - At the official opening event of its Beijing office, Symbian Ltd today announced the introduction of POSIX libraries on Symbian OS™, which will significantly reduce the effort required to migrate existing desktop and server components, and mobile applications from other platforms, onto Symbian OS. The move will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity. Symbian OS is the market leading operating system for smartphones.

P.I.P.S. - PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian - will enable C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source, to Symbian OS by providing standard POSIX C APIs on Symbian OS. This has been achieved by supplying a new framework of POSIX C APIs for use by both C and C++ programmers. The new APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries - libc, libm, libpthread and libdl - and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS to optimise performance and memory usage. In addition, an updated tool chain will further reduce migration effort.

Symbian
"Symbian smartphones are becoming increasingly powerful, and it is now realistic and desirable to migrate desktop and server code onto mobile devices, opening up exciting possibilities and attracting differently skilled developers to the Symbian ecosystem", said Jørgen Behrens, executive vice-president, marketing, Symbian. "With P.I.P.S., Symbian further demonstrates its commitment to open standards in the industry."

POSIX support is a natural step for Symbian which will allow an ever increasing number of popular desktop middleware and applications such as web servers and file sharing software as well as applications based on other mobile operating systems to be easily ported to Symbian OS. With over 100 million Symbian smartphones in the market, P.I.P.S. makes it even more compelling for developers to target Symbian OS.

Symbian
"P.I.P.S. is part of Symbian's ongoing investment to enhance the development experience on Symbian OS," said Bruce Carney, head of developer marketing, Symbian. "Native Symbian C++ continues to offer the richest set of APIs for smartphone functionality, with Symbian also enabling familiar frameworks, virtual machines and run-time-environments such as POSIX, Crossfire, Java, Python, Flash and OPL to help move any developer onto the market's leading and richest mobile OS. In addition, the market momentum for smartphones is growing quickly, making it even more attractive to move to mobile and Symbian OS."

IBM Software Group
Commenting on the announcement's implications for developer productivity, IBM Software Group's Dr. Michael Karasick, Director of Development, Client Platforms and Technologies, said, "Supporting open standards such as a POSIX layer for Symbian OS is a key part of our commitment to our customers. Using POSIX, IBM developers are given a simplified approach to porting customer solutions across a variety of platforms, now including Symbian OS, which is a very important platform for us."

A beta version of P.I.P.S. will be available for Symbian OS v9.1 and above as a downloadable .SIS file from the Symbian Developer Network http://developer.symbian.com/. by the end of Q1 2007.

-ENDS-

Notes to editors

P.I.P.S. includes the following libraries:

" libc - The "C Standard Library" with system APIs mapped to Symbian OS APIs for better performance

" libm - A mathematical library

" libpthread - Implements POSIX-style threading support in terms of the underlying Symbian OS thread support

" libdl - Implements POSIX-style dynamic linking which extends the dynamic loading model of Symbian OS

P.I.P.S. is a term for Symbian software libraries meaning "P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian".

About Symbian

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones known as smartphones.

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. During Q3 2006, 13 million Symbian smartphones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators. To date, more than 100 million Symbian smartphones have shipped cumulatively.

Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom, with offices in the United States, Europe (England and Sweden (UIQ Technology AB)), Israel and Asia (India, P.R. China, Korea and Japan). www.symbian.com

Media Enquiries

Valerie Breslow Breslow Communications US +1 858 337 4217 valbreslow@earthlink.net	Aleks Vujanic Burson-Marsteller UK Europe +44 20 7300 6299 symbian_pressuk@uk.bm.com
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