ARM signs up to Symbian group

UK CHIP SHOP, ARM, has said it will be joining Chinese technology group Huawei, Visa and nine other companies joining Nokia’s Symbian Foundation to get its hands on free software.

So far, 52 firms have signed up to join the Symbian Foundation, now considered a market-leader of open operating systems for mobile phones. Even the biggest players in the mobile phone market have put their names to it, giving Nokia a smug boost over Google’s Android.

Back in June, Finnish phone outfit, Nokia, said it would buy out British smartphone software maker Symbian’s shareholders for a whopping $410 million, in order to spread the love and make its software royalty-free to other phone makers. The move was mainly aimed at keeping rivals, and especially Google, at bay.

Nokia also argued that Symbian Foundation would be able to accelerate the pace of getting new products on the market. The firm says it will probably unleash its first unified Symbian Foundation software by next year and introduce a completely new platform by June 2010.

During the second quarter of 2008, 19.6 million Symbian mobiles were flogged globally to over 250 network operators. That brings the total number of units shipped up to 30 June 2008 to 226 million.

In related news, ARM also announced today that it would be releasing its ARM profiler for Symbian OS as part and parcel of its RealView Development Suite 4.0 Professional.

ARM reckons its new profiler will let mobile application developers who use Symbian OS add better features and also reduce power consumption. µ