Sharp turns to Symbian
PrintLooking for overseas sales boost
Posted in Mobile, 13th July 2004 13:04 GMT
Free whitepaper – Enhancing retail operations with unified communications
Sharp will begin shipping Symbian-based handsets next year in a bid to grow its share of the mobile phone market outside Japan.
Sharp currently uses its own phone OS, Itron, and incorporates it into handsets sold domestically by NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone.
According to Sharp Communications Systems president Masafumi Matsumoto, 70 per cent of its handsets are sold in Japan. "We would like to bring our international shipments up to 50 per cent of the total," he told reporters last week.
Hence Symbian, he added: "Cellular phones featuring the Symbian OS would be easier to distribute throughout the world, and it would be easier to differentiate."
Matsumoto said the Symbian OS would not be used on all Sharp handsets, but "we would like to gradually increase the percentage of our high-functionality products featuring the Symbian OS".
Symbian's website does not currently list Sharp as a licensee. ®
Related stories
Symbian raises £50m in rights issue
Symbian owners foil Nokia takeover
Symbian hands out certificates
Dollar decline stunts Symbian growth
Symbian doubles sales
PDA, smartphone sales rocket in Europe
Related reviews
Free whitepaper – The business value of SIP VoIP and trunking
Enabling the Agile Data Center
The business value of SIP VoIP and trunking
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Enhancing retail operations with unified communications
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter