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Bachmann Software has released a version of its PrintBoy application for Series 60 Smartphones ($20). PrintBoy is a popular mobile printing application that is also available for Pocket PCs and the Palm platform.

With PrintBoy, Symbian-based Series 60 smartphone users can print a number of different files, including those for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly from their handsets to popular office printers using infrared and Bluetooth connections.

Bachmann Software previewed PrintBoy for Series 60 with Nokia at the CTIA Wireless tradeshow in March. By partnering with Nokia and making a version of the application available for Series 60, Bachmann is supporting the mobile device area with the greatest potential for growth, smartphones. And within smartphones, Series 60 is the leading platform.

“Smartphones are increasingly being used for traditional office computing functionality such as e-mail, messaging and documents,” said Glenn Bachmann, president and founder of Bachmann Software. “Just as they would on their laptop computers, mobile business users who receive important attachments over e-mail on their smartphone expect to be able to open, view and print those attachments. With PrintBoy for Series 60, we’ve delivered on that expectation by giving smartphone customers the ability to produce hardcopies of their important documents anytime, anywhere.”

Series 60 Smartphones

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. The addition of CDMA should help Symbian device vendors in the United States, where that wireless standard still dominates. As it is, the Palm platform is much more popular in the United States because of products from palmOne with the Treo 600, Kyocera and Samsung.

A few days ago, Nokia announced two new Feature Packs to enhance the Series 60 platform. Among the new features, Series 60 will now include multiradio support with GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA and CDMA, phone displays with higher resolutions and enhanced enterprise support, including push email.

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. 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.