What is Symbian?
Symbian is a software development and licensing company that grew out of Psion Software, established as an independent company in June 1998. Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Psion, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. Its Licensees include : Ericsson, Fujitsu, Kenwood, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Samsung, Sanyo, Siemens, Sony, Sony Ericsson and Send.

Key Features of Symbian Operating system
Advanced, open, mobile phones are on the verge of becoming mass-market. For the industry to deliver products that satisfy the many users it is targeting, it has to produce devices with an operating system engineered to take into account the key functional demands of this emerging market.
To fit in the limited amount of memory a mobile phone may have, the operating system must be compact. However, as we have seen, it must still provide a rich set of functionality. What is needed to power a mobile phone is not a mini-operating system but a different operating system a tailored operating system. Symbian is dedicated to mobile phones and Symbian OS has been designed to meet the requirements of the mobile phone market. Symbian OS is very sophisticated mini-operating systems can't do what Symbian OS does. They don't have the power.
The five key points small mobile devices, mass market, occasional wireless connectivity, diversity of products and open platform for third-party developers are the premises on which Symbian OS was designed and developed. This makes it quite distinct from any desktop/workstation/server operating system. This also makes Symbian OS quite different from embedded operating systems, or any of its competitors, which weren't designed with all these key points in mind.
Symbian is committed to open standards. Symbian OS has a POSIX-compliant interface and a Sun-approved JVM, and Symbian is actively working with emerging standards, such as J2ME, Bluetooth, WAP, EMS, MMS, SyncML, IPv6 and WCDMA. As well as its own developer support organization, books, papers and courses, Symbian delivers a global network of third-party competency and training centers, the Symbian Competence Centers and Symbian Training Centers. These are specifically directed at enabling other organizations and developers to take part in this new economy. The Symbian Developer Network is at the heart of this global network of developer communities. Through Symbian's relationships with its licensees, partners and network operators, over 3 million developers have the tools and services available to become Symbian OS developers.
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