While rival platforms, such as the Palm OS and especially Windows Mobile are expected to gain market share and contribute to the rise of smartphones, the Symbian operating system currently dominates the nascent smartphone market. This is especially true in Europe where many more smartphones have been sold than the United States.

Within the Symbian market segment, smartphones that use Nokia's Series 60 platform are by far the most widely deployed. Series 60 is used to create smartphones with large color screens, a user interface for single-handed navigation, and a suite of mobile friendly applications.

Five (Lenovo, Siemens, Samsung, Panasonic, Sendo and Nokia) licensees have announced devices with the Series 60 interface. In addition, more than 100 operators are now selling handsets based on the Series 60 Platform, including all the major GSM operators in the US & Canada. Later this year, the Series 60 Platform will also support CDMA, which should prove a boon in the United States where CDMA networks still dominate.

That's not the only reason Series 60 vendors are in a good position. The world of mobile devices is moving away from handhelds that aren't connected to those that are. And of those that are connected, many of them will be WAN (Wide Area Network) devices or smartphones. And some of these, at the high-end, will combine WAN with Wi-Fi (802.11b), LAN (Local Area Network), and BlueTooth PAN (Personal Area Network) connectivity.

"Smartphone shipments worldwide are expected to have another year of 100 percent growth in 2004 and will continue to grow steadily through 2007," says Kevin Burden, manager of IDC's mobile devices research program. "Smart phones will claim the dominant market position from the traditional PDA this year, out shipping PDAs for the first time, and by a factor of 2 to 1. Furthermore, we see a trend where smartphones make up approximately 85 percent of all intelligent mobile device shipments by the year 2007."

According to Gartner, in 2003, more than 6.67 million smartphones based on Symbian OS were shipped worldwide. While this is a drop in the bucket compared to the over 520 million mobile phones sold worldwide last year, the overall sales of smartphones are expected to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Recent Developments

At CITA Wireless today, LG Electronics and Nokia announced a licensing agreement for the Series 60 platform. LG Electronics will license Series 60 as source code, enabling it to further develop and differentiate the software for its smartphones while maintaining application interoperability with current Series 60 software.

Not all Symbian applications run on all Symbian smartphones. For example, those written for another Symbian interface called UIQ won't run on Series 60 phones. There has been, however, more than 1,400 Series 60 based applications written. That is out of approximately 2,100 total Symbian-based applications.

In February, Legend Group became a Series 60 Platform licensee via the new Series 60 Complete Design Model. The Complete Design Model aims to allow Series 60 Platform licensees to deploy their Series 60 Platform-based products more rapidly. Nokia also setup a portal for Series 60 vendors.

Mobile Handset Anticipation

Two of the most highly-anticipated recent additions to the Series 60 family include Panasonic's upcoming X700 smartphone, and the Nokia 7610 imaging phone. Earlier this year, Nokia announced another, the first EDGE-capable handset based on the Series 60 Platform, the Nokia 6620.

The tri-band GSM/GPRSX700 is one of the first clamshell smartphones to offer a full color sub display and picture CLI (Call Line Identification). It integrates a VGA digital camera, photo light and 65,536 color TFT display. The company said the handset’s editing capabilities allow users to enhance the quality of these images. The X700 also offers video capture, download and playback.

The 7610 (see top of page) will be the first smartphone to integrate a megapixel digital camera, delivering the ability to capture, print, store and send photo-quality images and videos. It'll come in two flavors, both GSM. One will be able to run on 900/1800/1900 networks, while the other will be compatible with 850/1800/1900 networks. With the 7610's camera users can take images up to a 1152 X 864 pixel resolution. The camera has a 4x digital zoom and a self-timer. The 7610 can also capture images in low-light conditions. An integrated video recorder with an audio function allows users to take video clips up to 10 minutes long. It has 72MB of memory as well as a 176 x 208 resolution and 65,536 color display.