SYMBIAN DEVELOPER EXPO and INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, London and Berlin, Germany – Intel Corporation and Symbian announced today that Intel has joined the Symbian Platinum Partner Program. Intel will also start providing a new software development kit (SDK) that includes Symbian OS™ version 7.0 to help developers accelerate the design process of data-enabled cellular phones and applications running on processors based on the Intel® XScale™ microarchitecture. Symbian develops and licenses Symbian OS, the global industry standard operating system for advanced mobile phones to the world’s leading handset manufacturers, which account for over 80 percent of worldwide mobile phone sales

“The wireless industry is in the midst of a significant shift from simple voice-only phones to data-enabled smartphones that combine communications, wireless Internet access and computing functionality,” said Tony Sica, vice president of Intel’s Wireless Communications and Computing Group and director of marketing. “Intel becoming a Symbian Platinum Partner is the result of close co-operation between our two companies and a shared vision to help bring data applications and services to mobile phones.”

As part of the Platinum Partner Program, Intel has access to a range of commercial services, as well as access to Symbian OS source code and Symbian’s Partner Support Team.

Intel and Symbian worked together to optimize Symbian OS version 7.0 to provide rich multimedia and wireless capabilities for Intel XScale microarchitecture. The respective global ecosystems that support Intel and Symbian technologies help provide system integrators, original equipment manufacturers, original design manufacturers and independent software vendors with the hardware and software assistance they need to bring products to market more quickly.

The new SDK will be available on the Intel DBPXA250 development system with the optimized Symbian OS version 7.0 board support package to mobile phone manufacturers and software developers building products using the Intel® PXA255 and Intel® PXA26x processors. The development systems will include a number of optimized development tools including a compiler and the OS aware Intel XScale microarchitecture XDB JTAG Debugger for Symbian OS. Intel also provides support for wireless technologies like GSM/GPRS, 802.11, and Bluetooth.“Intel becoming a Symbian Platinum partner reflects the excellent on-going relationship between Symbian and Intel. This relationship will help provide our licensees with ‘state of the art’ solutions optimised for Symbian OS, and help to bring a variety of feature-rich multimedia solutions to market,” said Gilles Allain, vice president of partnerships and alliances at Symbian.

More information on how developers can start evaluating Symbian OS and its integrated Intel application support can be found at http://developer.intel.com and information on the Symbian Developer Network can be found at http://www.symbian.com/developer. Information about the Intel PCA Developer Network and the Intel DBPXA250 development system can be found at http://www.intel.com/pca.