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At least that's the impression one gets from the slew of announcements coming from the company's sixth annual event, Symbian Expo (taking place London this week), dedicated to its eponymous smartphone platform—by far the most used operating system for handsets that combine a mobile phone with the functions of a PDA.

How popular is Symbian?

According to recent statistics from Canalys, Symbian accounts for 63 percent of all mobile device (smartphone and PDA) sales around the world. Nokia, which sells 80 percent of all Symbian smartphones, nets an astounding 33 percent of the world's total mobile device dollars (see Nokia, RIM Star as Mobile Device Shipments Soar).

And with 40 new phones in development by ten licensees with six licensees currently shipping 27 smartphones, 3,250 applications commercially available, and more 3G handsets$#151;five Fujitsu products for NTT DoCoMo and three products with Motorola for Europe$#151;than any other platform, Symbian is well-positioned for the future.

ABI Research predicts that Symbian's share of the worldwide mobile phone operating system market will land at around 50 percent by 2009, with most of the rest of the market being seized by Microsoft. That's at a time when most pundits agree nearly all mobile phones will be smartphones (see Palm's Uphill Battle).

Symbian Expo Highlights

Intel, Nokia & Symbian
Intel and Nokia are a collaborating to bring smartphones based on the Nokia Series 60 platform—built on top of the Symbian OS#151;to market using Intel technology. In addition, Intel and Symbian are investing in the co-development of a reference platform. This latter agreement focuses on building the first 3G-reference platform that uses Intel's and Symbian's expertise.

By bringing Intel onboard, Symbian and Nokia strike a blow to Microsoft, who's Intel-based smartphones have thus far failed to attract nearly as many consumers as Symbian's. By partnering with Nokia and Symbian, Intel has a better chance of gaining a larger share of the wireless market sooner.

TI, Symbian Silicon of Choice
While Intel is just now joining the Symbian community, competitor Texas Instruments (TI) is well established with the leading smartphone platform. TI wireless technology, including OMAP processors, powers 28 of 31 Symbian OS-based 2.5G and 3G handsets either in-market today or scheduled to ship soon. More than 85 percent of the five million Symbian OS-based phones shipped in the first half of 2004 were based on TI's OMAP platform.

"TI's technology has been a key driver in 2.5G and 3G handsets and has significantly contributed to the rapid emergence of the smartphone category. The close cooperative relationship between Symbian and TI has helped TI become one of the most successful semiconductor companies in the smartphone category," said David Levin, Symbian CEO.

IBM, Symbian Target Entperise
Symbian is working with IBM to develop and test enterprise solutions for the Symbian OS. The companies are showcasing IBM WebSphere Client Technology, Micro Edition , Websphere Everyplace Access, WebSphere Everyplace Connection Manager, and WebSphere Everyplace Device Manager technologies on Symbian smartphones at the Symbian Expo.

According to the companies, the solutions leverage IBM's CDC-compliant Java Virtual Machine for Symbian OS smartphones, offering extended Java functionality that can address enterprise developers' needs and surpasses the functionality of MIDP on mobile devices, which is currently popular with Symbian OS developers.

New Symbian Smartphone
The U300 (see top image) is the first Symbian OS smartphone manufactured by Arima. It incorporates the UIQ user interface, which is also found in Sony Ericsson's popular P800, P900 and new P910 smartphones. It features a sliding keypad, rotating 1.3 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and flash, a 2.66 inch 65,000 color touch screen, PC synchronization, FM radio and an audio and video player.

Avantgo for P910
iAnywhere Solutions has worked with Sony Ericsson to provide AvantGo mobile content to users of the new Symbian-based P910 smartphone. Sony Ericsson smartphone users can now synchronize hundreds of mobile websites containing news, weather, sports, and entertainment, including content from many of the world's top media brands, using either their desktop computer or a wireless internet connection.

Content Beamer for Symbian
With ThinPrint's Content Beamer 2.3, employees can use a Symbian smartphone to access information on the company server to read email attachments, or initiate database queries. Documents can be displayed on the smartphone as pure text to save the user the bandwidth of downloading the whole document.

Bluetooth Stack for Symbian
CSR PLC's embedded Bluetooth software stack BCHS (BlueCore Host Software) is now available in a version optimized for the Symbian platform. CSR's BCHS for Symbian provides ODMs (original device manufacturers) with a tailored Bluetooth host stack for smartphone applications. As a result, CSR can now provide a comprehensive range of up to 17 Bluetooth profiles for this operating system. The goal of BCHS is to reduce the risk and cost of adding Bluetooth to a Symbian smartphone by creating a single source solution with proven and integrated software and hardware. The result for the end-user should be a better Bluetooth experience.

Visto E-Mail & Sony Ericsson P910
Sony Ericsson's P910 is among the first mobile handsets to support Visto 5.0, which brings push-based, real-time, and over-the-air e-mail, as well as calendar and contact information to the smartphone (see Vendors Target Mob-E-Mail Dollars).

Visto's ConstantSync technology ensures that new messages, message replies, and calendar or contact updates made on mobile phones are updated on the PC or corporate messaging server automatically and instantly with absolute synchronicity between the user's Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items folders.