Samsung throws weight behind Symbian

HAVING INFAMOUSLY outed Samsung as a Symbian licencee at CeBIT, the INQ has now seen the Korean handset vendor throw even more of its weight behing this mobile OS.

Samsung picked the Symbian Smartphone show in London to launch the i550 handset. Not only is this handset Symbian based, it also uses Nokia's Series 60 3rd edition software.

Significantly, the i500 is also Samsung first GPS handset and features support for HSDPA which provides a theoretical 3.6 Mbit/s throughput over 3G.

The fact that Samsung has launched no fewer than five different Symbian based phones in the space of one year is obviously a tremendous boost for Symbian in its battle against the Beast of Redmond.

As Symbian marketing vp, Jorgen Behrens, described it to the INQ, "That's a whole lot of handsets by historical standards."

Samsung itself sees the move to support Symbian as a "testament to our strategic foucus on the open OS phone market," according to Geesung Choi, president of Samsung Telecommunications' network business.

It's a bit strange to descibe Symbian as 'open' but then Microsoft describes Windows as open, too. µ