Symbian Ltd.
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Symbian Ltd. is a software development and licensing company that produces Symbian OS, a smartphone operating system.
It was established in June 1998 and is headquartered in Southwark in the UK, and the current CEO is Nigel Clifford.
On 24 June 2008, Nokia announced it would acquire Symbian Ltd. in full.
[edit] Symbian OS
Symbian develops and licenses Symbian OS, an operating system for advanced 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. User interface layers are provided by third parties. These include Series 60 and Series 80 by Nokia, UIQ from UIQ Technology and MOAP for NTT DoCoMo.
[edit] Shareholding
Symbian is privately-owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita, Siemens, Sony Ericsson and Samsung.
The company's founder shareholders were Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita and Motorola. Motorola sold its stake in the company to Psion and Nokia in September 2003. Psion's stake was bought by Nokia, Matsushita, Siemens AG and Sony Ericsson in July 2004. While BenQ has acquired the mobile phone subsidiary of Siemens AG the Siemens AG stake in Symbian does not automatically pass to BenQ - this will need the approval of the Symbian Supervisory Board.
Much of Symbian's initial intellectual property came from the software arm of Psion PLC.
[edit] Licensees
Current licensees of Symbian's operating system are:
[edit] Key people
The current CEO is Nigel Clifford. The previous CEO, David Levin, left in 2005 to head United Business Media PLC. The founding CEO, Colly Myers, left the company in 2002 to found IssueBits, the company behind SMS information service Any Question Answered (AQA).
