Just ahead of the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Symbian Foundation has announced a slate of new partners signing on to support the Symbian mobile operating system…and the new announcements, at least temporarily, give Symbian a bigger slate of supporters in the mobile arena than Google’s Android platform. Among the new Symbian Foundation members include technology heavyweights like Hewlett Packard and Qualcomm, social networking giant MySpace, memory and PMP developer SanDisk, and financial giant Bank of America. Also on board: Atelier, Gemalto, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, Nanoradio, Omron Software, SESCA, SiRF Technology, and VirtualLogix.
Altogether, Symbian now counts 78 industry partners for its mobile operating system. As of December, Google’s Android platform boasted 47 partners.
Late last year, cell phone maker Nokia bought out the other shareholders of the UK’s Symbian and promised to make the system available on a royalty-free basis. The first version of the Symbian Foundation’s software is due later this year, with an entirely new platform expected by 2010.
