The smartphone OS vendor, Symbian has announced the availability of its updated v9.3 smartphone operating system. Symbian OS v9.3 includes incremental enhancements in line with market requirements related to phone performance and reducing time-to-market for handset vendors. With an aim to extend Symbian smartphones into the mass-market, Symbian's focus is to ensure Symbian OS is adopted as the operating system of choice by its customers, the world's leading handset manufacturers, for the development of higher volume and lower cost, smartphones.
Jorgen Behrens, Vice-President, Product Management and Strategy, said: "As the smartphone category broadens into different market segments and quickly expands across global regions, Symbian continues to focus on delivering a flexible and robust open mobile operating system. Symbian OS v9.3 will allow handset manufacturers and network operators to get the best and most differentiated phones to market faster, with lower costs and more easily. Approximately 35 million Symbian smartphones shipped in 2005. By providing enhanced market leading provisioning with Symbian OS v9.3 and a consumer market trend leaning towards convergence, we expect smartphone shipment numbers to increase rapidly."
Symbian OS v9.3 is fully backwards compatible with previous versions in the v9 family. Symbian OS licensees currently have phones based on Symbian OS v9.3 in development, with product launches anticipated in 2007.
Symbian OS v9.3 includes:
Improved phone performance
Reduced development and ownership cost, and time to market
Support for new hardware
Support for key operator services and requirements
Firmware over the air (FOTA) provisioning, FOTA allows network operators to provide OTA software upgrades or fixes lowering cost of ownership
Posted to the site on 13th July 2006
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/18260.php