17 January 2008

Symbian reaches 30 million smartphone
shipments in Japan!

Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford

Symbian Limited, developer and licensor of Symbian OS™, the market-leading operating system for smartphones, today announced that over 30 million phones based on Symbian OS have shipped in Japan up until the end of November 2007.

Symbian’s market share of the NTT DoCoMo FOMA™ market grew in one year from 50% to 65% at the end of H1 2007(Source: Techno Systems Research).

To date, a total of 69 mobile phone models based on Symbian OS have launched in Japan by six Symbian customers: Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Motorola, Sharp and Sony Ericsson.

Kiyohito Nagata, Senior Vice President Managing Director, Product Department Products & Services Division NTT DoCoMo, Inc. commented “The robustness, security and ease of customisation of Symbian OS contributes greatly to a short development time and the possibility of development for a wide variety of handsets, and I am sure that this is linked to today’s announcement that there have now been over 30 million Symbian smartphones shipped in Japan. We will further strengthen our partnership with Symbian with the view to developing new features quickly.”

Symbian OS is engineered for flexibility and scalability, powering popular devices in diverse Japanese market segments such as high-end, mid-range, simple (Raku-Raku PHONE), music, high-speed download and “One-segment” terrestrial broadcasting.

Haruhiko Hisa, President, Symbian Japan, said: “We are proud to have reached a significant milestone in Japan, through the close collaboration we have with our network operator, handset manufacturer and ecosystem partners. With the recent launch of new Symbian technologies: FreeWay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), Symbian OS is well placed to power the high demands and new capabilities, such as Super3G, being rolled out in the Japanese market.”