Welcome! Before we start with the Symbian OS and Series 60 programming tutorials. Lets just try and know about the background of Symbian.

• Who is Symbian?
• Symbian Licensees
• Symbian Devices

Who is Symbian?
Symbian was founded in June 1998 as an independent company, initially by Psion, Nokia and Ericsson. Motorola joined later in 1998 but no longer has a shareholding, it remains a Symbian OS licensee though. Panasonic joined in May 1999, Sony Ericsson joined in 2001, while Samsung and Siemens in 2002. Psion sold off its shares to Nokia and no longer has any stake in the company. Symbian is basically a software licensing company. The core business being to supply the advanced, open operating system, Symbian OS for data-enabled phones.

Nokia has 47.9% stake in the company. Ericsson has 15.6%. Sony Ericsson 13.1%, Panasonic 10.5%, Siemens 8.4% and Samsung 4.5%.

Symbian Licensees
In addition to the partners of the company, there are a number of other companies that license the Symbian OS for use in their own products. Some of them are Fujitsu, Sanyo, Sendo, BenQ, Mitsubishi Electric, Arima, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Sharp, etc.

Symbian Devices
Some of the devices that use Symbian OS:

• Ericsson R380
• Nokia 9210 Communicator
• Nokia 7650
• Sony Ericsson P800
• Panasonic X700

and many more…

We’ll start looking at Symbian OS and its architecture in the future articles before we start with the dirty coding part and the Series 60 part.