Nokia Buying Symbian Is a Bold Move

By Carsten Brinkschulte

Nokia recently made a groundbreaking announcement. They have fully acquired Symbian, a developer of mobile operating systems, which was initially formed as a partnership between themselves, Psion, Ericsson, and Motorola.

On announcing this acquisition, Nokia have stated that they intend to immediately provide the code at no cost to members of the Symbian Foundation. More importantly, however, within the next two years, Nokia plan to make the entire Symbian system open source.

From Synchronica's perspective, Nokia buying Symbian is a bold move of the handset manufacturer in response to the potential threat by Android (Google's mobile phone OS which will be available free of charge to device manufacturers).

From Synchronica's perspective, this is all positive - the more diversity in operating systems, the better for us. Unlike our proprietary competitors, we do not need to develop clients for the various platforms, but simply use the built-in clients.

Symbian, like Android, have built-in support for SyncML / OMA DS, IMAP, and OMA CP, so we wish them every success. However, please remember that the smartphone market share is still less than 20 percent of the market, and in our target of emerging countries represents a small fraction of that.

About Synchronica

Synchronica plc develops and markets mobile email and synchronization solutions for mobile operators and device manufacturers. Products include the award-winning push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway and the device backup solution Mobile Backup. Based on industry standards, Synchronica can reach the built-in email and synchronization clients of more than 1.5 billion mobile devices on the market today. Service providers in emerging and developed markets use Synchronica products to offer mobile email, PIM synchronization, and backup and restore services to consumer and business subscribers.

Synchronica recently acquired AxisMobile and is set to become the leading player in mass market mobile email and synchronization middleware. The enhanced Synchronica Mobile Gateway will offer the most comprehensive multi-protocol mobile email solution in the market today, introducing email-to-SMS and email-to-MMS, as well as WAP and XHTML gateways. Document transcoding will add the ability to display a large variety of attachments, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on standard feature phones.

Headquartered in England, Synchronica has a development center in Germany and presences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Synchronica plc is a public company traded on the AIM list of the London Stock Exchange (SYNC.LN). More information is available at www.synchronica.com

For more information, please contact:

Nicole Meissner
Chief Marketing Officer
Tel.: +44 1892 552 780
Mobile: +44 7977 256 412
Fax: +44 1892 552 721
nicole.meissner@synchronica.com