Symbian Limited has announced Symbian Academy, a program to provide free support to universities teaching knowledge and skills associated with developing software for Symbian OS™ , the market-leading open operating-system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones, also known as smartphones.

Symbian OS is the number one choice for smartphone software developers with over 70 million Symbian smartphones shipped to-date worldwide. As the smartphone category stretches into the mass market, the opportunity to generate profit from Symbian applications and services has become an increasingly attractive proposition, leading to a rising demand for high-quality Symbian developers.

Symbian Academy is designed to make it easy for universities to create courses that teach Symbian software development and to integrate a Symbian component into existing computer science courses. University lecturers affiliated with Symbian Academy will receive free course materials, training, technical support, development literature, expert Symbian lecturers and exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.

Symbian

To help cultivate the next generation of mobile software developers, Symbian Academy will foster partnerships between academia and industry, maintaining the growth of the thriving Symbian ecosystem. Bruce Carney, Head of Developer Marketing, said, “Developers are very important to the success of Symbian OS and Symbian is constantly looking for ways to increase their number and skills. Symbian Academy is one of several initiatives being undertaken to ensure that developers of every level have access to the support that they need.”

Forum Nokia

Harri Pennanen, Head of Academic Relations, Forum Nokia, said, "As Symbian enters the mass-market it is increasingly important that the smartphone industry engages with academia. Nokia believes that the creation of Symbian Academy will help to increase the number of suitably skilled software engineers, who will in turn provide the applications and services the market requires. Symbian Academy's free support for the teaching of mobile software development will complement Nokia's own extensive network of research and development with its existing university relationships."

Member of a university that wish to become affiliated with Symbian Academy should contact for further details.