14 DAY TRIAL // The company which is part owned by Psion released today a new version of its operating system which supports high resolution cameras and 3D game graphics. The new software is run on a more powerful platform, provided by British chip manufacturer ARM.
The new Symbian OS can handle pictures of more than two million pixels and can transmit stereo music to a wireless headset. Importing MP3 files from a computer is a breeze and there's no more need for any synchronization software.
The first phones with Symbian "operating system version 9" will be introduced in the second half of 2005, but high sales are expected, as usual, at Christmas time, says Peter Bancroft, one of the company's representatives. While its license fees are unchanged from version 8, Symbian hopes its tools to lower development costs.
Symbian is running on about 20 million phones, linked to over 200 mobile operators around the world. Its biggest supporter is top mobile phone producers in the world, like Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, all of them adopting alternative sollutions to Microsoft products.
However, not only MS is having security problems, last year Symbian had to deal with the first virus created for smartphones.
That worm program, dubbed Cabir by Russian antivirus company Kaspersky, apparently used the Bluetooth short-range wireless feature of smart phones that run the Symbian operating system to detect other Symbian phones, and then transfers itself to the new host as a package file.