| 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: 1493
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 March 2008:
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2008 |
Symbian surpasses the 200 million unit sales mark. It took us eight years to reach 100 million units and only a further 18 months to cover the next 100 million. |
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2007 |
Symbian announces new technologies for the future of converged device development including FreeWay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) |
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2006 |
100 million Symbian smartphones shipped |
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2005 |
Symbian OS v9 announced with Platform Security and support for single core processors, WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari™ browser |
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2004 |
Symbian OS selected by NTT DoCoMo as software platform for 3G FOMA™ handsets |
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2003 |
Symbian smartphones support mobile payments in Japan, first Motorola smartphone on UIQ A920, Samsung becomes a shareholder |
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2002 |
First smartphone on UIQ – Sony Ericsson P800, Siemens and Sony Ericsson become shareholders |
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2001 |
First open Symbian smartphone - Nokia 9210 Communicator - and first GPRS, camera smartphone - Nokia 7650 |
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2000 |
First touch-screen phone - Ericsson R380 on Symbian OS v5 |
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1999 |
Symbian and NTT DoCoMo sign R&D agreement to develop smartphones for Japan, Matsushita (Panasonic) becomes a shareholder |
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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 predicting that 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
"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 lead 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. We believe 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
"Smartphone will upset traditional business models as carriers get out of the practice of subsidizing handsets in the US. Over the next 18 months, you'll see many of the top-end smartphones offered [by the carriers] subsidy-free in exchange for a greater combination of offerings including one-year contracts or no contracts at all." Andy Castonguay, Yankee Group April 2008
"Smartphone Sales will grow at a rate of more than 30% a year for the next five years.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.
"Two key factors will drive the growth (of digital music purchases): global expansion of broadband availability and growth of full-track downloads to mobile handsets in markets other than Japan. Revenue for worldwide full track mobile downloads will reach approximately $4.2 billion by 2012." Revenue Opportunities Abound In Online and Mobile Music Distribution, In-Stat, Apr08 (Source: http://www.intomobile.com/2008/04/14/in-stat-digital-sales-will-account-for-40-of-all-music-purchases-by-2012.html)
"The smartphone market continues to evolve rapidly, with adoption rates, vendor and platform leadership differing by region. We forecast smartphones sales for 2008 will reach about 173 million units, up 42% compared to 2007. By 2010, smartphone sales will surpass 1 billion units cumulatively." Forecast: Smartphones by Operating Systems, Worldwide, 2004-2011
(Source: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=579907&ref=g_sitelink )
"Canalys forecasts that cumulative global shipments of smartphones will pass the one billion mark by 2011. "There is still a long way to go in terms of what smartphones can deliver to businesses and consumers. The potential for applications such as personal navigation, in vehicle and for pedestrians is huge – our end-user research shows there is tremendous interest globally. This will also lay the foundation for a new era in location-based services, in many different forms, and we expect the smartphone to be at the heart of this opportunity. Consumer and professional users’ expectations are also increasing in areas such as advanced phone-based web browsing, remote intranet access and the ability to run customized applications, which will also fuel smartphone growth. In 2007, Symbian had 67% of the worldwide smartphone market and was the clear leader in the Asia-Pacific, EMEA and Latin America regions.” Pete Cunningham, senior analyst at Canalys
* Includes Linux 'closed' phones in Asia and excludes PDAs
[1] IDC: Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker
[2] http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=616236
[3] http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=616236
[4] http://www.rim.com/news/press/2008/pr-02_04_2008-01.shtml
[5] http://www.deviceguru.com/2008/01/30/124-billion-mobile-phones-expected-to-ship-in-2008/
[6] Gartner "Forecast: Smartphones by Operating System, Worldwide, 2004-2011" by Roberta Cozza, January 2008
[7] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21190708
Symbian today released unaudited financial and operational figures for the first quarter ended 31 March 2008
Symbian to publish Q1 2008 financial and operation results
New Symbian Ready technology validation program