Symbian, the creator and manager of its eponymous smartphone operating system, saw global shipments of handsets based on its platform double to 2.4 million in the first quarter of this year over the first quarter of 2004.

Symbian is the leading worldwide supplier of smartphones, which are mobile handsets that combine the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) with CDMA or GSM wireless phone and data capabilities. Shareholders in the company include Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, and Siemens.

Psion announced plans to sell its shares to Nokia, the number one mobile phone vendor, earlier this year. This would give Nokia a majority share in the company, which hasn't made the other shareholders happy. As a result, the other shareholders are considering increasing their share of he company, which they can by buying some of Psion shares. Should they choose to do this then the organization may not come under Nokia control.

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 Sybmian-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.

Of course, Symbian has a lot of competition, especially for arch rival Microsoft, which has started to make some headway with its Windows Mobile operating system. Research and consulting firm ARCchart predicts that PC and PDA vendors could swing the smartphone market in Microsoft's favor. If the PC and PDA vendors do enter the market, ARCchart estimates that by 2008 it would cut the Symbian operating system's market share lead to just 8 percentage points above the Windows Mobile for Smartphone platform, giving Microsoft an overall 33% market share of smartphones.