Symbian today announced Symbian OS v9.5, the latest evolution of the world's leading operating system for smartphones.

Symbian OS v9.5, backward compatible with all versions of the v9 family, includes the following key enhancements: 

Higher performance for lower hardware cost

Symbian OS v9.5 delivers performance improvements with reductions in requirements on memory, processor and battery, enabling smartphones based on Symbian OS v9.5 to run on the same hardware as feature phones.

Faster time to market

Symbian is continuing to improve time-to-market for handset vendors, system integrators and developers. Symbian OS v9.5 introduces new hardware adaptation interfaces for digital TV and location based services (LBS) making it cheaper and easier to bring popular services to the mass market. 

Designed for richer user experiences:

Multimedia

Symbian smartphones based on Symbian OS v9.5 will support rich multimedia experiences with advanced camera features similar to standalone digital cameras with 35 new features including image orientation following tilt sensor, preset image enhancements, digital/optical zoom, auto focus spots, panorama stitch, image distortion correction auto-focus such as red-eye reduction. With improved seamless connectivity to home computers, enabling the easy transfer of music, videos and images, one smartphone can replace several devices.  In addition, with support for multi-standard digital TV (DVB-H, ISDB-T) and standardised LBS, the Symbian smartphone will bring true convergence to consumers worldwide.

Enterprise

New Symbian smartphones will enable users to be more productive and save costs with Wifi-3G connection roaming.  Professionals will gain the advantage of having services such as push-email and VoIP run over WiFi when in the office and automatically switch to 3G when on the move. In addition, real-time networking ensures that VoIP is not interrupted when other IP-based services, such as web browsing or push email, make a connection.

Smartphone lifestyle

With over 70% market share, Symbian continues to provide flexibility and choice to leading handset vendors who sell Symbian smartphones to over 250 network operators worldwide. The introduction of Brahmic script in Symbian OS v9.5 which extends Symbian OS support of languages to cover 99% of the world’s countries, the support for global standards including HSPDA, HSUPA and digital TV, makes Symbian the only true global mobile operating system powering both mid-range and high-end mobile phones.