Symbian Growth Slows In Q2Symbian Growth Slows In Q2

While Symbian saw more than 19 million units ship with its Symbian OS in the second quarter, a global economic slowdown led to a dip in growth.

The software company reported Tuesday that 19.6 million phones shipped with its OS, an increase of 5% from the same period the year before. But this was a decrease from the first quarter, as the company saw an annual growth rate of 16.5%.

The Symbian OS is by far the leading operating system in smartphone and multimedia phones. But mid-tier and high-end handsets have been experiencing a bit of a sales slowdown due to rough economic times. Overall though, consumers are expected to eventually migrate over to more sophisticated devices like smartphones.

Symbian said seven licensees had 92 phone models in development, an increase of 48% from the year before. Additionally, sales of Symbian-powered devices are expected to pick up in the second half of 2008 as high-profile devices like Nokia's N96 and Samsung's Innov8 are released.

"We've worked hard to extend the close collaboration with our customers and operators and have built a strong product pipeline," said Nigel Clifford, Symbian CEO, in a statement. "Our highly innovative product roadmap will ensure that Symbian OS continues to lead in the high-end converged devices and smartphone markets whilst its penetration into the mid-range segments increases."

This earnings report is also the last that Symbian will be publishing before becoming fully owned by Nokia. In June, Nokia said it planned to fully purchase Symbian and form the Symbian Foundation to convert the mobile OS into a free, open-source operating system.

The Symbian Foundation is backed by some of the world's largest handset and chip manufacturers, and the lack of royalty allows Symbian to match pricing on competing open-source mobile platforms like Google's Android.