With several major phone makers behind it, the Symbian OS platform is showing major signs of making inroads with over 100% growth in the past year.
Discussed and planned for years, mobile phones based on the Symbian OS platform have been making significant strides of late. Global shipments of Symbian OS handsets grew from 1.18 million in Quarter 1 of 2003 to 2.4 million in Quarter 1 of 2004, an increase of more than 100%.
The Symbian OS platform now has nine licensees, five of whom are shipping Symbian OS handsets currently. Between them, there are a total of 18 Symbian OS-based handsets on the market, with seven new handsets announced but not yet shipping in Quarter 1 alone, three of them from Nokia. The Symbian consortium also signed on three new licensees, including number 5 handset maker LG Electronics, Arima in Taiwan, and Lenovo, formerly Legend Group, in China.
Now up to version 8.0, Symbian OS was developed by a consortium of companies led by Nokia and Psion. Version 8.0 of the OS is intended to reduce development costs and improve device management, multimedia, and Java capabilities. Psion recently agreed to sell its interest in the platform to Nokia, and final approval from regulatory agencies is expected to come shortly.
Although it has been redesigned several times in its colorful lifespan, Symbian OS was designed from the ground up for smart phones and WAN handhelds. That puts it in direct competition with Palm OS devices such as the Treo 600 and Windows Mobile for Smartphone devices such as the Motorola MPx200. Palm OS and Windows Mobile were both originally designed as stand-alone handheld OSes that are now being adapted for phones and always-on WAN handhelds, while Symbian OS was built specifically for advanced wireless data devices. Interestingly, a number of companies are keeping their fingers in several pies, including Motorola, which sells both Windows Mobile and Symbian OS handsets, and Samsung, which sells handsets based on all three platforms.
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