In the face of the Windows Mobile 6.0 launch, Symbian chose to announce that 51.7m Symbian smartphones shipped to users worldwide in 2006 - a 52% increase on the year before. And by the end of 2006 there were 108 Symbian smartphone models shipping from nine licensees through over 250 major network operators – up 80% on 2005 65 of those phones were new launches during the year.
And there are now 6,896 third party Symbian applications commercially available, a 50% increase on the 2005 figure. Symbian has just announced Symbian OS v9.3, “optimised for convergence and market segmentation with performance and feature enhancements”, which will begin shipping in devices in 2007.