[ARM, HP, Motorola, RealNetworks, and TI join Symbian's Platinum Partner Program. Also, Symbian and TI announce cooperative effort to further optimise the performance of Symbian OS on TI's wireless OMAP platform. Symbian also announced support for the ARMv6 architecture in the Symbian OS.]

London -- Symbian, creator of Symbian OS, the open, industry standard operating system for advanced mobile phones, today announces that ARM, HP, Motorola SPS, RealNetworks, and Texas Instruments have joined its Platinum Partner Program. They and more than 80 other Platinum Partners meet today at the Symbian Partner Event (SPE) in London to discuss the rapidly expanding commercial opportunities and advanced technical developments around Symbian OS.

The SPE is designed to bring together Symbian partners from across the mobile industry - technology innovators, content & service providers and network operators - to communicate the latest advances in Symbian technology and to foster commercial contacts and business opportunities for Symbian Partners.

In addition, Symbian and Texas Instruments announced that they are extending their strategic co-operation to further optimise the performance of Symbian OS on TI's wireless OMAP(tm) platform as part of the Symbian Platinum Partner Program. Through joining Symbian's Platinum Partner Program, TI continues its long-standing, strategic co-operation with Symbian as one of the earliest semiconductor companies to use Symbian OS on its OMAP platform.

A further announcement involves Symbian's native support for the ARMv6 architecture in Symbian OS. The companies collaborated for more than a year to enable concurrent development of the ARMv6 architecture and future versions of Symbian OS. This collaboration has resulted in Symbian's development of a highly optimized system OS solution. Utilizing the physically addressed caches in the ARM1136J-S(tm) core reduces Symbian OS context switch times, which provides better memory management performance and reduced power consumption through eliminating forced cache flushing by the operating system - both of which are critical aspects for mobile devices. ARM recently introduced its first ARMv6 architecture-based solutions, the ARM1136J-S core, which is included in the ARM11(r) PrimeXsys(r) Platform. Texas Instruments has licensed both of the new ARM11 cores from ARM, for its next-generation OMAP microprocessors and wireless chipsets.

"The Symbian OS coupled with TI's ARM core-based OMAP platform provides wireless manufacturers and application developers with the performance and power efficiency required to deliver advanced multimedia applications," said Alain Mutricy, TI vice president and OMAP Platform general manager. "We are committed to working closely with Symbian and ARM to ensure that future OMAP processors that leverage the new ARM11 cores are highly optimized for the Symbian OS."

"The combination of an ARM11 PrimeXsys Platform using the ARMv6 architecture and the Symbian OS, will provide a rich multimedia experience for mobile phone users," said Mary Inglis, director, Operating Systems Business Development, ARM. "Writing applications for Symbian OS which utilize the new multimedia SIMD instructions in the ARMv6 architecture, will allow applications developer to create more compelling content for a given clock speed without compromising battery life".

Symbian OS products powered by microprocessors based on the ARM1136J-S core and the ARM1136JF-S core are expected to come to market in 2004.

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