30 million Symbian OS Phones in Japan!!!!!!

Published by Rafe Blandford at 11:58 GMT, January 17th 2008

Symbian today announced that at the end of November 2007 cumulative Symbian OS phone shipments reached 30 million. It took 10 months to go from 10 million to 20 million phones, but has only taken a further 8 months to reach 30 million. Japan is a mature market so this growth is likely on the back on increased market share (50% to 65% year on year as of June 2007).

Symbian OS phones in Japan take the form of MOAP-S phones running on NTT DoCoMo FOMA network. MOAP is the user interface / software platform and is the equivalent of S60 and UIQ. However MOAP phones are not open to native third party applications. MOAP is available in two variants MOAP-S (Symbian) and MOAP-L (Linux).

69 Symbian phones have shipped in Japan, manufacturers include Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Sharp and Sony Ericsson. A few locked down S60 Nokia phones have also been available.

From the press release:

Kiyohito Nagata, Senior Vice President Managing Director, Product Department Products & Services Division NTT DoCoMo, Inc. commented “The robustness, security and ease of customisation of Symbian OS contributes greatly to a short development time and the possibility of development for a wide variety of handsets, and I am sure that this is linked to today’s announcement that there have now been over 30 million Symbian smartphones shipped in Japan. We will further strengthen our partnership with Symbian with the view to developing new features quickly.”

Haruhiko Hisa, President, Symbian Japan, said: “We are proud to have reached a significant milestone in Japan, through the close collaboration we have with our network operator, handset manufacturer and ecosystem partners. With the recent launch of new Symbian technologies: FreeWay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), Symbian OS is well placed to power the high demands and new capabilities, such as Super3G, being rolled out in the Japanese market.”