While it is mildly disappointing to see headlines such as “Nokia fails to control Symbian” from The Guardian or “Rivals pay to block Nokia's control of Symbian” from USA Today the reality is that Symbian has emerged stronger from the sale of Psion’s shareholding. Symbian now has a clearly stated intention of moving the OS out of high-end smartphones and into mid tier devices. In fact Symbian is setting itself very aggressive targets believing that by 2008 there is an addressable market (that is phone which could use Symbian OS) in the region of 70 million handsets.

The cornerstone of growth will come from reducing the bill of materials for building a phone based on Symbian OS, which in 2003 was a minimum of $132 and by 2008 Symbian hope to have reduced to $78. Symbian OS v8.0 is a key part of this strategy as it allows phones to run using only one CPU, something which alone will reduce the bill of materials by between $20 and $30. In many ways this is not a new strategy as Symbian have been running a series of collaborative research projects, which were announced at the Symbian Platinum Partners Event in December 2003, to improve the competitiveness and value of Symbian’s overall offering. Led by David Wood the first of these projects focuses on time to market.

The strategy, which is being funded by the right issues of £50 million, will also see Symbian grow its staff from the current level of 900 to close to 1200 over the next 18 months. The majority of these new positions will be for, what David Levin, Symbian’s CEO described as “talented” software engineers.

Symbian now has 10 licensees working on 34 new products. The three licensees not actively developing product for market (which does not mean these companies are not undertaking R&D around Symbian OS) is not stated but given public announcements it is likely to be LG Electonics, Sanyo and Levono, who are most likely waiting to use v8.0.

For the developer community there was also news that there would be an increased level of co-operation in Series 60, UIQ and FOMA UI development which promises to make life easier for developers targeting multiple UIs.

While the growth in sales of Symbian OS phones has increased dramatically in the last two years, taking shipment phones from under a million to a total of 12.4 at the end of April this year, future growth, if this strategy pays off will be even more substantial.

A couple of footnotes are worth pointing out. Samsung did not exercise it preemption rights due to what David Levin described as the complexities created by South Korean regulatory requirements. Symbian remains the only company which Samsung holds a minority shareholding in. Ericsson also declined their rights despite having earlier indicated that they would, although the early comments from Ericsson suggested the rights might be exercised via Sony Ericsson, which is certainly what appeared to happen as Sony Ericsson made the most substantial contribution to the rights issue.

Finally Psion is no longer a licensee, or at least no longer listed on the licensees’ page of Symbian’s web site, which unfortunately means that the possibility of seeing a Psion Netbook powered by Symbian OS has evaporated.