Support for the Symbian Foundation Gains Momentum on the Road to Mobile World Congress
Congress in
apace. The organisation’s leadership team is in place and is engaging with
its rapidly growing ecosystem of developers, hardware manufacturers and other
partners. The foundation has also ramped up its recruitment drive.
Joined by many of our existing partners, the Symbian Foundation will be
on stand 8A77 in the Fira Hall 8 from
various MWC activities throughout the show, including the Mobile Application
Developer Garage and WIP Jam: Day for Developers, and
deliver his view of open source in mobile (details below). We invite you to
come and join us.
“We’re in a unique position to continue the rapid growth of the most
competitive open software platform. Every single member of our community has
a chance to influence the way we evolve and develop our offering,” said
Williams
provide, manage and unify the platform but it’s the community which will make
it great.”
“We already have fantastic support from across the industry and Mobile
World Congress will provide an excellent forum to meet and share ideas,
perspectives and insight with both new and existing supporters, with the
ultimate aim of benefiting our community members.”
Seventy-eight industry partners have now pledged their support in making
this vision reality; Atelier, Bank of America, Gemalto, HP, Imagination
Technologies, Mobica, MySpace, Nanoradio, OMRON SOFTWARE, Qualcomm, SanDisk,
SESCA, SiRF Technology and VirtualLogix all add their endorsements to the
other companies already announced.
“Atelier is very excited about the Symbian Foundation initiative,” said
Pascale EDOM, CEO of Atelier. “From a pioneer in the use of Symbian OS we
have become a leading independent vendor in telephony integration. We believe
that the Symbian Foundation with its open platform will attract more players
and will generate many innovative new products. Atelier intends to join the
foundation and support our customers and the foundation’s members as its
platform evolves.”
“The Symbian Foundation’s platform will allow us to further enhance the
mobile banking experience for our customers,” said
product development at Bank of America. “The Symbian Foundation’s commitment
to choice and open industry standards will ensure Bank of America’s ability
to offer more value added services to our industry leading 2 million active
mobile banking user base.”
“Gemalto welcomes this initiative for the Symbian Foundation. This key
move will create an environment that accelerates innovation and increases
customer experience”, said
Advanced New Telecom Offers at Gemalto. “Gemalto is proud to bring to the
table SIM related software components that speed up adoption of new
technologies by the whole ecosystem. This new generation of SIM cards and
software will be instrumental in the development of applications such as
handset customization, the portability of personal settings, local browsing
and contactless technology. It will enable the developer community, building
on Symbian security solutions, to make personal digital interactions more
convenient, safe and enjoyable.
“HP is very excited that the market leading mobile operating system,
Symbian, will be moving to open source. This is a bold move that can change
the industry and HP looks forward to participating,” said
Mobility Solutions Group. “HP already supports many Symbian OS-based devices
with our popular Mobile Device Management products for OEMs and Network
Operators and will continue to enhance its products for the Symbian
Foundation platform in future.”
“Imagination Technologies fully supports the plans for the Symbian
Foundation as a highly significant industry initiative for accelerating the
creation of robust, multimedia feature-rich mobile phones and related
products,” said
“Mobile phone manufacturers adopting Symbian OS have been among the most
enthusiastic adopters of our POWERVR graphics and video technologies. With
our industry-leading experience in graphics, video and composition, which is
unrivalled in the mobile market; coupled with our extensive work in open
standards such as Khronos’ OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG APIs, we believe
Imagination will become a key player in the Symbian Foundation ecosystem.”
“Mobica welcomes plans for the Symbian Foundation and the drive towards
the creation of an open source platform”, said
“We believe that this move will significantly increase the number of parties
in the community supporting the Symbian Foundation platform, accelerating the
creation of innovative and compelling applications and services for
consumers. As a leading provider of world-class mobile professional services
to key members of the Symbian OS ecosystem today, we look forward to
continuing our work with Symbian Foundation members and share the vision of
an open platform available to all.”
“MySpace is dedicated to supporting open standards and platforms and we
embrace plans for the Symbian Foundation,” said
and general manager of Mobile for MySpace. “Mobile is a central element of
the MySpace business strategy and we believe an open platform will allow
developers, OEMs, and wireless carriers to create compelling and innovative
services that can leverage the rich social functionality and content of
MySpace.”
“As a market leader in mobile WiFi solutions, providing the most
competitive solutions in terms of smallest foot print and lowest current
consumption, Nanoradio AB welcomes the Symbian Foundation initiative,” says
software is the way forward for feature-rich mobile phones and that embedded
WiFi will play a vital role in such devices, built on the Symbian Foundation
platform. We are committed to working with the Symbian Foundation and its
members to continue providing state of the art, low power WiFi/Connectivity
solutions for the benefit of consumers and Fixed-Mobile Convergence
operators, thus enabling longer sessions WiFi usage thru our “Always On WiFi”
TM technology.”
“OMRON SOFTWARE’s history with Symbian OS began when we became a Symbian
Competence Center in
such as text inputting software, image recognition software, localization
service, UI designing, OS porting,” said
Mobile Solution Business Division,OMRON SOFTWARE. “We fully expect that the
Symbian Foundation initiative will provide the community with the latest
technology and consistent performance, and that Omron’s customers, in turn
will benefit from the increased innovation, usability, design features. We
look forward to contributing to the progress of the Symbian Foundation.”
“Open platforms will help spur innovation and creativity within the
mobile industry, and Qualcomm is very excited by the plans for the Symbian
Foundation,” said
Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “As the world’s largest provider of wireless
chipset technology, Qualcomm intends to seek membership in the foundation and
work with its members to continue to deliver innovative wireless solutions.”
“SanDisk endorses the Symbian Foundation plans and looks forward to
cooperating with its members in the future. Standardization of the Symbian
Foundation platform can help drive innovation and enable a faster adoption of
new applications” said Mr.
SanDisk. “SanDisk, the inventor and a world leading supplier of embedded and
removable flash storage devices, believes that the Symbian Foundation
platform can further drive high capacity storage adoption as a basis for
mobile multimedia experience. SanDisk will work with Symbian Foundation
members to optimize system behavior and user experience for future mobile
devices.”
“SESCA welcomes plans to establish the Symbian Foundation and looks
forward to the software platform being available in open source, which SESCA
believes will reduce the risk of further fragmentation,” said
Director Mobile Devices Software at Sesca. “As a world-class specialist in
customized software development and solution services, Sesca has been
involved with S60 on Symbian OS mobile device development for ten years. We
expect to quickly leverage our expertise in development, integration and
verification, built from working with the leading companies in the industry,
for the benefit of the foundation’s members and their customers.”
“SiRF Technology, Inc., a leader in GPS enabled location-aware solutions,
welcomes the efforts to establish the Symbian Foundation and is pleased to
join the other companies that share confidence in this initiative,” said
enthusiastically endorses the vision of open source mobile platform operating
systems that will encourage innovation in the dynamic and constantly changing
mobile marketplace.”
VirtualLogix is a strong supporter of the Symbian Foundation’s plans to
expand Symbian Foundation platform reach by opening it up and making it
widely available to a larger developer community,” said
Corporate Strategy, VirtualLogix. “We expect our VLX virtualization software
to bring enhanced performance, power consumption, security and manageability
to the Symbian Foundation ecosystem including semiconductor vendors, mobile
device manufacturers, operators and users. VLX combined with the Symbian
Foundation platform will accelerate the development of devices based on the
foundation platform.”
Since plans for the Symbian Foundation were announced, hundreds of
organizations have registered their interest in joining the foundation via
the website at http://www.symbianfoundation.org.
As previously announced, the plans for the establishment of the Symbian
Foundation and royalty-free licensing of foundation software are:
1. The acquisition of Symbian Limited by Nokia, completed as planned in
Q4, 2008.
2. Software assets are contributed to the foundation, including Symbian
OS(TM) and S60 by Nokia, UIQ technology by Motorola and Sony Ericsson and
MOAP(S) by NTT DOCOMO and Fujitsu.
3. This contributed software will be available under a royalty-free
license to foundation members from the first day that Symbian Foundation
assets are made available, expected 1H 2009.
4. The foundation will work to unify the platform, with the first unified
foundation release expected in 2009.
5. The foundation will work to make the platform available in open source
by
Symbian Foundation in 2009 Mobile World Congress program:
Symbian Foundation will host a Mobile World Congress stand at Fira Hall
8, 8A77 during
demos, Symbian Foundation will be part of the event program as follows:
Monday 16th February
10.00 - 17.00: Mobile Application Developer Garage
Organised by the GSMA, Hall 5, Auditorium 3
The Symbian Foundation is hosting a Garage demo pod showcasing the latest
developer tools and
the panel, ‘The future of application development’. The Garage is new to
Mobile World Congress and targeted entirely at developers.
Wednesday 18th February
14.00 - 17.30: Mobilising Open Source
Hall 5, Auditorium 3
during this part of the conference program and will deliver his view of open
source in mobile.
Thursday 19th February
10.00 - 17.00 WIP Jam: Day for Developers
Hall 2, Sala (Room) D, Fira (floor between exhibit floors 1 & 2)
The Symbian Foundation is sponsoring this day dedicated to mobile
developers and will be leading and participating in several discussion topics.
Notes for editors:
Further information about the Symbian Foundation is available at
http://www.symbianfoundation.org and
http://www.symbianfoundation.wordpress.com
Symbian and all Symbian based trademarks and logos are trademarks of
Symbian Software Limited. Until the Symbian Foundation has become fully
operational, Symbian Software Limited retains exclusive responsibility for
all licensing and marketing activities related to Symbian OS.
About the Symbian Foundation
On
create the Symbian Foundation, with membership open to all organizations. At
the same time, Nokia announced its offer to acquire Symbian Limited.
The contributed software will be available for all foundation members
under a royalty-free license, from the foundation’s first day of operations,
expected to be during the first half of 2009. From these contributions, the
foundation will then provide a unified platform with a single UI framework.
The foundation will make selected components available as open source at
launch and then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering
available in open source.
The foundation’s platform will build on Symbian OS, today’s leading open
mobile software operating system with more than 250 million mobile phones
already shipped by multiple vendors across more than 250 major network
operators and with tens of thousands of third-party applications already
available for these devices.
The foundation software licensing model and governance has been selected
to secure transparency, encourage contribution and maintain platform
consistency. The foundation will promote collaboration, contributions and
active participation and will operate as a meritocracy. Device manufacturers
will be eligible for seats based on number of Symbian Foundation
platform-based devices shipped, with the other board members selected by
election and contribution. Only one seat will be available per organization
on the board of directors and each of the councils.
SOURCE Symbian Foundation