Company Overview
Company History
Symbian is a software licensing company that develops Symbian OSTM, an open operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones also known as smartphones. Symbian was originally established by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion as a private independent for-profit company in June 1998. Headquartered in the UK, it now has more than 1300 staff with offices in China, India, Japan, Korea, Sweden, UK, and the US. Company Objective
Symbian OS
Since its formation, Symbian's mission has been to establish Symbian OS as the world standard for mobile digital data systems, primarily for use in cellular telecoms.
Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers and builds close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. During H1 2006, 24 million Symbian smartphones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators, bringing the total number of Symbian OS phones shipped to 82.8 million. With approximately 70% market share, Symbian OS is the global market leading open operating system for mobile phones.
By setting the standard for wireless computing and telephony, Symbian brings together and instills trust in the wireless value chain. Symbian OS drives standards for the interoperation and interoperability of data-enabled mobile phones with industry bodies and mobile networks while fostering a broad, international, developer community. Symbian OS also supports complex worldwide requirements of network protocols.
A platform for wireless services
A set of standard application programming interfaces (APIs) across all Symbian OS smartphones and the advanced computing and communications capabilities of Symbian OS enables the development of advanced services and applications for a fast growing smartphone market. According to John Jackson, Director, Wireless/Mobile Technologies, Yankee Group, by 2010, well over 200 million smartphones will be selling worldwide each year, representing 18% of annual global volumes.
With a powerful aligning force in the wireless value chain, mobile phone manufacturers, network operators and software developers are assured that they are working with an industry standard platform that is trusted, and allows customization. As the smartphone category broadens into different market segments and quickly expands across global regions, Symbian focuses on delivering a flexible and robust open mobile operating system. Symbian OS v9 allows handset manufacturers and network operators to get the best and most differentiated phones to market faster, with lower costs and more easily. By providing enhanced market leading provisioning with Symbian OS v9.3, the latest Symbian OS release, and with consumer market trends leaning towards convergence, Symbian expects Symbian OS smartphone shipments to continue to increase rapidly.
What is unique about Symbian's offering?
It is power efficient, multitasking, standards based, open, C++ focused and Java friendly. Symbian OS includes integrated support for multimode telephony, networking (WAN and PAN), messaging, security and a framework for building compact UI implementations. Symbian OS also adds industrial strength PIM applications to mobile phones and offers rich APIs for developers.
However, the strongest endorsement of Symbian is in fact that the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers (including the world's top 5) license and continue to develop and ship phones based on Symbian OS.
As smartphones functionality becomes pervasive, the handset market will be able to meet segment-specific demands rapidly, and at low cost. The burgeoning service environment around 3G networks in many major markets places are increasing demands on handset requirements. A robust, scalable OS and associated enabling software is crucial to vendors' product roadmaps, and operators' ability to deploy differentiated services. Symbian OS enables significant market requirements in phone performance and hardware capabilities that allow handset manufacturers to bring more attractive differentiated phones to market more quickly. Company History with ARM
How long has the company been working with ARM?
Symbian's origins are from Psion Software and therefore ARM and Symbian have been working together since 1994 - prior to Symbian's formation in 1998. In the early days, the ARM design team worked on system on a chip (SoC) system architecture used in Symbian OS based PDA's produced by Psion Plc, which gave ARM an extensive array of expertise in working with Symbian OS and enabled the Company to gain Symbian Competence Center status.
As a member of Symbian's Tools and Semiconductor Partner program, ARM also works closely with Symbian's engineers in developing new tool chains as well as ensuring that Symbian OS takes full advantage of the ARM architecture and the many benefits derived from ARM's Intellectual Property (IP) which include:
- minimized risk implementation through access to key ARM processor expertise
- accelerated time-to-market
- a robust software structure designed to flexibly adapt to future requirements
- enabling ultra low-power consumption and high performance
ARM technologies your company supports:
Today Symbian OS only runs on ARM ISA. Through deep engineering collaboration Symbian OS has been optimized to run on all ARM CPU cores containing an MMU.
Why have you chosen to work with ARM?
Symbian OS was designed from the outset to work in mobile phones. Symbian and ARM have been working together for many years to enhance and optimize Symbian OS to run on current and future generation SoCs containing ARM CPU cores. This hardware/software platform is becoming the platform of choice by most of the major handset manufacturers as the basis for their mass market open OS phone programs.
Benefits of working with ARM?
Our relationship with ARM has helped Symbian to become the No1 open operating system for mobile phones (Q2 2006 Canalys, Gartner)
Specialist area as an ARM partner?
Symbian is a key operating system partner for ARM.
Can you highlight any end products that PGC/ARM technology is being shipped with?
As Symbian OS only runs on silicon containing ARM CPU cores, 100% all of the phones launched by Symbian's licensees include ARM technology.
Market information:
Market leader - as of Q2 2006:
- 12.3m Symbian OS shipments in Q2 2006 - a new Symbian smartphone model shipped every week in Q2
- 82.8m cumulative Symbian OS phone shipments since the formation of Symbian
- 23 Symbian smartphone models commenced shipping in Q2 2006
- 5,323 third party Symbian applications are now commercially available, an increase of 29% on Q2 last year (Q2 2005 - 4,122 applications)
- 55 phone models in development from nine licensees
- 92% of the worldwide 3G open OS market was powered by Symbian OS (source: Rachel Lashford, Canalys - July 2006)
- 15 of the 23 (65%) Symbian OS phones shipping during Q2 2006 were designed for 3G W-CDMA networks
For further information go to: http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html |
