Symbian Limited today announces the availability of Symbian OS v9.3, the latest evolution of the world's leading smartphone operating system.

Symbian OS v9.3 includes incremental enhancements in line with market requirements related to phone performance and reducing time-to-market for handset vendors and network operators' cost-effective deployment of revenue-generating services, content and applications.

Symbian OS v9.3 is fully backwards compatible with previous versions in the v9 family. Symbian OS licensees currently have phones based on Symbian OS v9.3 in development, with product launches anticipated in 2007.

Symbian OS v9.3 includes:

• Improved phone performance
• Shorter start-up times for phones and key applications
• Improved memory management resulting in more responsive applications and phone features ensuring smartphones work as quickly with better quality features as mid-range phones
• Reduced development and ownership cost, and time to market
• New development tools
• Backwards compatibility from v9.1, easy migration for phone vendors, technology and third party software providers
• Reference design for Symbian OS v9.3 with Freescale and Nokia S60
• Hindi and Vietnamese language support for improved market coverage
• Support for new hardware
• Native support for WiFi
• USB 2.0 on-the-go, allowing faster device connectivity
• Support for key operator services and requirements
• Firmware over the air (FOTA) provisioning, FOTA allows network operators to provide OTA software upgrades or fixes lowering cost of ownership
• HSDPA support
• Introduction of IPSec for UMA service (Voice over IP)
• Improved 3GPP R5 support
• Native support for Push To Talk
• Java JSR 248 support