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Symbian and Samsung Electronics have jointly announced Samsung will license the Symbian operating system for its upcoming line of 2.5G and 3G smart phones worldwide.

Samsung will also use the Nokia Series 60 reference design for the user interface and other handset services. The company had previously announced it would use Symbian for hybrid phone-personal digital assistant devices.

"We don't do services or content. We leave it to our licensees to create the user interface on top of the OS," said Peter Bancroft, vice president of communications at Symbian.

While the Symbian OS has been "below the radar" in the United States, with not many handsets shipped from the leading manufacturers, this will change over the next several months, said Bancroft.

Fourteen more handsets will come from eight manufacturers within the next three to four months, Bancroft added.

Gathering Support

Symbian OS is a joint venture from Motorola, Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, Ericsson, Siemans, Panasonic, and Psion. Each of those manufacturers is expected to begin shipping Symbian-based phones.

Despite the ever-increasing competition from the likes of Microsoft, Palm, and RIM for the cell phone market, Symbian does not believe those companies are its major competitors.

"Our biggest competition comes from the handset manufacturers' own internally developed operating system," Bancroft said.

Worldwide, Symbian appears to be gaining market share from both the OS manufacturers as well as the in-house proprietary operating systems.

Symbain's share of the handheld device OS market in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa grew 252 percent over the last year, boosted by Nokia's launch of a phone running Symbian's software.

The jump leaves sales of devices running competing software trailing growth in the market as a whole, market researcher Canalys.com said Monday.

Overall, 1.18 million handheld devices with electronic organizer functionality and synchronization capability were shipped in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in the third quarter, up 104 percent from 578,600 in the year-ago period, Canalys of Reading, England, said in a statement.

Market Share Report

Symbian, profiting from the introduction of Nokia's 7650 phone, saw its market share rise to an all-time high of 57 percent in the third quarter, up from 33 percent in the same period last year, Canalys said. Symbian, in London, develops an operating system for mobile phones and handheld computers and is owned by several mobile phone makers and Psion.

Shipments of handhelds with Microsoft software in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa rose 93 percent in the third quarter to 231,770 units, helped by product introductions from Toshiba and Fujitsu Siemens, and gave Microsoft a 20 percent share of the market, one percent lower than a year earlier.

Microsoft is breathing down the neck of rival PalmSource. A total of 234,730 devices running the Palm OS shipped in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in the third quarter, 27 percent more than last year, but far below the overall market growth of 104 percent. The share of Palm OS devices on the market dropped from 32 percent last year to 20 percent, Canalys said.

"This is the closest Microsoft has ever been to Palm. It is within touching distance now," said Chris Jones, senior analyst at Canalys.

Market shares will likely keep fluctuating, Jones said. Palm traditionally has good fourth quarters and should benefit from its new low-priced Zire model, while Orange is preparing the launch of a mobile phone running Microsoft software, and Dell Computer will introduce a PDA running Microsoft's Pocket PC software, Jones said.

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