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One of the emerging trends in mobile marketplace has been the increasing adoption of smartphones. When we talk of smartphones, Symbian is the first word that comes to our mind since it has taken over 70% of the existing smartphone market. Symbian OS is an open operating system that powers the most popular and advanced smartphones from the world’s leading handset manufacturers. Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world’s leading handset manufacturer like for example Nokia and some other leading names such as Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Motorola, Mitsubishi Electric, Sharp and others.

Symbian has all those salient features that make it stand apart from other operating systems. It targets mass market by providing a wide range of products with wireless connectivity and offers an open platform for independent software developers. It has maintained a continuous focus on improved user experience, by keeping in mind the diverse individuality of different users. Other than this, the phones with Symbian operating system include basic features such as calendars, contacts, messaging, push email and web browsing, but can also extend easily to any enterprise information system.

Looking at the sole success of Symbian phones it is found out that 20.4 million Symbian smartphones have been shipped in quarter 3 of 2007. Symbian is also the leading OS for smartphones in China with a market share of 60% in Q2 2007. The robustness, security and ease of customization of Symbian OS contributes greatly to the possibility of short development time for a wide variety of handsets making it over 30 million Symbian smartphones shipped in Japan up until the end of November 2007.

In the previous few months, we have been witnessing some major industry changes in which Google has launched a new operating system called as “Android”. Android is built from ground up with the goal of being the first open, complete and free platform. It has managed to gain a broad developer base and industry support from the leading companies such as T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola and many others. Some leading mobile operating systems of mobile communication industry such as Symbian and Microsoft have still denied in becoming a part of it.

Nokia has remained a global market leader that uses Symbian OS. A recent rumour has been that Microsoft is trying to grab Symbian’s share by convincing Nokia to move to Windows mobile OS. Although Microsoft still has quite less chance of becoming successful since they share only meager part of smartphone market. But we have to consider the fact that if Nokia shifts towards Microsoft, how this will affect the dominance of Symbian OS. However for the moment, it is indeed pleasing to find that Symbian OS - based smartphones have gained immense amount of popularity in a very short time and they truly have a great beneficial and positive impact on the mobile industry.