Sony signs up Symbian

Sony will license the Symbian consortium's Epoc operating system for its next generation of mobile phones, boosting Epoc's prospects.

Hiroshi Yoshioka, vice president of Sony's Personal IT Network division, said: "The first devices will be the third-generation mobile phones which we will introduce next year." Sony is targeting the Japanese market for the new devices, but will later offer them globally.

"In the transition to the next-generation broadband cellular phones, what users need is ubiquitous access to the internet and portable entertainment," said Yoshioka.

"To provide reliable access solutions for this area, Sony needs an operating system that provides reliable multi-task functions."

The main functions of the smartphones will be email and portable entertainment, particularly the ability to download music. Sony says that the power consumption of the new devices will be almost the same as current mobile phones.

Symbian is the consortium owned by Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia and Psion. It licenses and supports software, user interfaces, application frameworks and development tools for wireless information devices such as Communicators and smartphones.

Symbian competes with Palm and Microsoft's Windows CE, now renamed Pocket PC. Symbian was quick to deny suggestions that Sony is to formally join the grouping.

Colly Myers, Symbian's chief executive, said: "This is a licensing deal between Symbian and Sony, not a shareholding deal."

Sony will also use Texas Instrument's digital signal processor-based Open Multimedia Application Platform processing engine in its smartphones.

First published in Computing

See also:

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A dismembered Microsoft could still bite

The Redmond giant is increasing its dominance over the wireless device market, as main rival the Symbian group fails to live up to expectations.  23 May 2000

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IBM has announced an open wireless data initiative with support from several leading players, but Microsoft is notably absent from the list.  14 Mar 2000

Inso sets up Symbian partners programme

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Symbian cements mobile platform with Quartz

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Developers realise the potential of Symbian

Software developers are flocking to create applications for the Symbian mobile computing platform, the company's chief executive Colly Myers said today.  16 Feb 2000

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