Symbian and Freescale Develop A New 3G Phone

British mobile phone software company Symbian and U.S. chip maker Freescale joined together to develop a blueprint of a smartphone for fast 3G wireless networks. Also, Symbian announced that it will halve its license fees for these phones to give smaller cellphone companies a chance to get into the 3G market. The design, based on Freescale's single 3G phone chip, opens the market for mobile phone producers that currently lack the engineering strength to develop models on their own, stated Symbian Chief Executive Nigel Clifford. "We provide the core of the handset so that they can concentrate on design, features and the user interface." That will help small phone makers compete more effectively with big vendors, which are Symbian's shareholders, making the market more competitive.

Symbian competes with Microsoft's Windows Mobile software, which powers many smartphones built by Asian contract manufacturers ordered by telecoms carriers like Orange, owned by France Telecom, and T-Mobile. In addition, the two software companies continuously face Linux as an open source alternative for feature phones. Vendors of Linux claim they can power feature phones for as little as $1 a piece. Symbian and Microsoft, however, claim this does not include development costs which can be higher for Linux-based models. The two also claim there are more applications developed for their phones.