Symbian, the market leading open operating system for mobile phones, today celebrates its ten year anniversary. This year already, over 20 new mobile phones have been announced on Symbian OS v9. All of the world’s top five handset manufacturers have announced new Symbian OS models and more will come to market this year with volumes continuing to grow.

As Symbian marks its ten year anniversary with a celebration of its past achievements and milestones, today also marks the start of the most significant transformation of the company since it was founded, as it moves into its second exciting decade and the next stage of its evolution.

Symbian remains focused on further strengthening the development and adoption of its open mobile platform with a vision of becoming the most widely used software platform on the planet. Today’s announcement of the Symbian Foundation (www.symbianfoundation.org) is a big step that follows this vision. According to Canalys data, on average Symbian OS has accounted for 60% of the global converged device market over the last year 12 months; the new Symbian Foundation will only build on the company’s ongoing success.

“Symbian was established by visionary players to offer an advanced operating system and bring software skills to the whole mobile industry,” said Nigel Clifford, CEO, Symbian. In ten years, we have achieved an enormous amount, inventing a market, building that market – and ultimately, making that market. It took us eight years to reach 100 million units and less than two years to cover the next 100 million and we are confident that we are going to see even faster growth in the years to come.”

Jørgen Behrens, Executive Vice-President, Marketing, Symbian said “The Symbian Foundation is a bold new step by the industry towards our vision. It embraces a complete and proven platform, offered in an open way, designed to stimulate future innovation, through collaboration with partners and developers and through technology developed using collaborative open source methods.”

Symbian was established in 1998 to enable mobile phone manufacturers, operators and developers to create innovative applications and devices required to drive forward mobile phone data, internet usage and high quality multimedia experiences around the world. The Company estimates that they are now over 4 million active Symbian developers around the world working on Symbian OS and supported runtimes to develop new phone technologies and applications.

With the industry's longest track record of educating, stimulating and enabling an open ecosystem around smartphone and application development, Symbian sees developers as core to the success of the platform. Today Symbian’s software is the development platform for over 10,000 mobile commercial applications used on phones from the leading manufacturers.

As the world of mobile changes to embrace video and rich content, Symbian continues to innovate to support the developers of these applications. In the past year the company has introduced the Freeway IP broadband networking architecture that enables superfast broadband on the mobile,; Screenplay, the graphics architecture product; and the SMP multi-processor architecture to drive ‘performance-on-demand’.

“Today’s announcement gives all of us in the Symbian ecosystem an opportunity to pause and reflect on the phenomenal achievements of the past ten years,” continued Behrens. “No single software platform worldwide can claim such widespread usage and success or such future potential as the mobile phone usage grows and develops in every region around the world. The skills of a Symbian software developer have never been more in demand.”

Nigel Clifford concludes, “On behalf of all at Symbian I would like to thank our shareholders and partners for their support over the past ten years and we look forward to continuing our successful collaboration well into the future. I know that they, in turn, pay tribute to the millions of developers in the Symbian ecosystem and to the people at Symbian who continue to help us move towards our vision. As mobile phones become more sophisticated and multi-functional the most successful platform will be one that has the broadest reach geographically, the broadest reach in terms of contributors and the broadest reach in terms of environments. This is what we will create through the unified platform and I am confident we will continue to extend its influence and usage around the world”.

Symbian has received many awards and much recognition for its achievements in the past ten years including the recent Queen’s Awards in April 2008 – one for Enterprise in Innovation, for Symbian’s track record in driving the development of mobile devices, and one for Enterprise in International Trade, recognising Symbian’s doubling of exports to £197m in the three years to December 2007.

See more about Symbian