Symbian has launched a new program called Symbian Signed to promote best practices in Symbian OS content and application development. The goal of the program is to reduce the cost and complexity of getting applications to market.

Symbian is the leading worldwide supplier of smartphones, which are mobile handsets that combine the functions of a personal digital assistant with CDMA or GSM wireless phone and data capabilities.

According to Symbian, operators, application publishers and phone makers currently offer individual certification schemes resulting in extra costs and a more complex route to market for application developers. Symbian Signed provides a single signing scheme that can be used as an alternative to many of the individual schemes.

The program tests applications against agreed on criteria in support of network operator and mobile manufacturer requirements. The program also delivers developer authentication and anti-tamper security for Symbian OS applications. More than 300 Symbian native C++ and Visual Basic application and their associated content have already reached Symbian Signed status.

In addition, the program is already being supported by many of the manufactures who create Symbian-based smartphones, including Nokia, Sendo and Sony Ericsson.

“With 12 million Symbian OS phones already in the market and Symbian OS phone sales rising more than 100% year-on-year in the last quarter, Symbian developers are creating third party applications at an increasingly rapid rate. Symbian Signed builds on Symbian’s existing support for application developers by creating even wider commercial opportunities for applications and faster routes to market that require less cost and effort,” said Simon Garth, Vice President, Market Development, Symbian.

MobiMate's WorldMate 2004, a mobile travel application and service, is the first application to be Symbian Signed on two platforms -- both Nokia's Series 60 Platform, and the UIQ platform.

Symbian

Global shipments of handsets based on the Symbian platform doubled to 2.4 million in the first quarter of this year over the first quarter of 2003.

Symbian has nine licensees with eighteen handsets currently on the market from five of them. The three most recent licensees include LG Electronics, Arima, and Lenovo. In addition, Symbian licensees shipped two new products in the first quarter, the Nokia 3620 and NTT DoCoMo's F900i made by Fujitsu, compared to three in the first quarter of 2003.

Nevertheless, seven new Symbian-based handsets were announced this quarter, including Motorola's third Symbian handset, the A1000; Nokia's 9500 Communicator, 7610 and 6620 imaging smartphones; Panasonic's first Symbian device, the X700l; Samsung's SGH-D710 and Siemens; SX-1 for the Chinese market.

The latest version of Symbian OS, version 8.0, already released to licensees, aims to enable accelerated development of lower cost Symbian OS phones, enhanced device management, multimedia and Java capabilities At the end the first quarter, 30 phones and variants based on Symbian OS were under development by nice licensees.

According to Gartner, in 2003, more than 6.67 million smartphones based on Symbian OS were shipped worldwide. There were a total of about 10 million smartphones sold, which takes into consideration Symbian, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS and Linux. 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. ABI Research predicts Symbian will ship on almost a quarter of all handsets by 2009. That's in a market that should top 600 million units.