Samsung buys 5% of Symbian

KOREAN FIRM SAMSUNG signed up with Symbian to use its operating system last year. Now it has well and truly sealed the deal by buying into the London based software firm.

According to Bloomberg, Samsung purchased a 5% stake in Symbian for £17 million. We find it just as interesting that it means the mobile operating system company has a market value of £340 million.

Samsung had been courted by both Microsoft and Symbian for some time. The firm was signed up to produce a Microsoft Smartphone 2002 handset. When it announced the switch to Symbian at CeBit last year there were plenty of industry watchers who were left agape.

Symbian is a joint venture between several firms including Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Sony - Ericsson and Psion. The operating systems it produces grew out of Psion's PDA software Epoc. µ

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