Symbian joins Eclipse Foundation to support free Open Source development tools for Symbian OS

The Symbian Smartphone Show, London, UK, October 11th 2005 - At The Smartphone Show today, Symbian Limited announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider. Symbian is contributing substantial development work, as well as adding its experience and expertise, to the global, community-owned Open Source project. Symbian engineers have already contributed to the development of the C/C++ Development Tools project ("CDT") which is the core deliverable enabling C/C++ development on the Eclipse platform. Symbian is committed to providing on-going support for this activity to ensure that a high quality, Open Source tools platform exists for Symbian OS tools vendors, enabling them to create many and varied tools that meet the needs of all developer audiences.

Symbian develops and licenses Symbian OS, the operating system that powers today's most popular smartphones. Symbian OS is licensed by the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers and to date, almost 40 million phones based on Symbian OS have shipped to more than 200 network operators worldwide.

“Symbian is delighted to demonstrate publicly its support and commitment to the values and success of this important Open Source project. We recognise that the Open Source Eclipse development environment has been adopted by all types of developers around the world. Through our on-going strategic engagement with the Eclipse Foundation, Symbian is making sure that Symbian OS developers will be able to chose fit-for-purpose, market-leading tools solutions at every price point, made available by Symbian's extensive range of tools partners - from free entry-level tools through to high-end device-creation products,” said Jorgen Behrens, VP Strategy and Product Management, Symbian Software Ltd.

“We are delighted that Symbian is joining the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider and continuing the strong contributions they have already made to the CDT project and to the advancement of Eclipse in general,” said Doug Schaefer, CDT Project Lead, Eclipse Foundation. “We look forward to their on-going support to help make Eclipse-based tools the leading development environment for Symbian OS.”

The first tools to be based on Symbian's work with the Eclipse Foundation are being demonstrated to developers by Symbian and its tools creation partners on the ‘Symbian Developer Community' stand at this year's Smartphone Show, ExCeL Centre, London.

About Symbian Ltd.

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS™, the global open industry standard operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones.

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. In the first half of 2005, more than 14.5 million Symbian OS-based mobile phones were sold worldwide to over 200 network operators, taking the installed base of Symbian OS phones to almost 40 million.

Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom with offices in the United States, Europe (Cambridge, UK and Ronneby, Sweden (UIQ Technology AB), Israel and Asia (Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo).

About The Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit member-supported corporation that hosts community based open source projects. Eclipse creates royalty-free technology and a universal platform for development tools integration, modeling, testing and functionally rich application construction. Eclipse-based offerings give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a dynamic plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create and integrate technology, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, providers can concentrate and focus on areas of expertise and differentiation. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows-based systems.