Samsung Covers Bets, Announces Symbian Phone

HANOVER, GERMANY -- After building personal digital assistant and cell phone hybrids based on operating system software from Microsoft and its rival Palm, Samsung Electronics recently acknowledged it is also working on a device running Symbian's operating system.

The Seoul-based electronics company--the world's fourth-largest mobile-phone maker in terms of units shipped, according to research firm Gartner--is a key Microsoft partner in the mobile space. It is the first with plans to market a portfolio of handsets that run operating systems from each of the three archrivals.

"We are developing a Symbian-based smartphone," says Jay Yeo, product planning manager for Samsung's wireless terminal division, here at the CeBIT trade fair. "The software makers mind, but they can't force us to stick to one or two operating systems; we live in a free world."

Samsung will support the three platforms to offer the broadest choice possible to its customers, which will initially be corporate users, Yeo says. Users of PDAs based on Microsoft's operating system will feel comfortable with a handset powered by Microsoft's SmartPhone 2002 OS, while Palm PDA users might prefer a Palm OS-based phone, he says.

Handsets in Progress

Work just started on the phone-cum-PDA based on the Symbian software, so a release date is not available, says Yeo. Meanwhile, Samsung plans to introduce handsets based on Microsoft's SmartPhone 2002 OS, previously known by the codename Stinger, and on the Palm OS in Europe in the fourth quarter in time for the holiday shopping season, according to Yeo. Launch of a new Palm OS-based Samsung device on the U.S. market is imminent, he adds.

Yeo showed a prototype of the SmartPhone 2002-based Samsung handset, a fliphone with a 176-by-220-pixel TFT display capable of displaying 65,536 colors. The device comes with flash memory and RAM, but Yeo declines to specify the amount of memory as that could change in the final product. The handset features a MultiMediaCard slot for memory expansion, Yeo says.

Symbian software is used in mobile phones sold by some of its shareholders. The company, set up in 1998, is owned by L.M. Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita Electric, Motorola, Psion, and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.