Symbian today announced its latest set of figures. In Q3 2007 20.4 million Symbian OS handsets were shipped representing 56% year on year growth (13 million in Q3 2006). The total number of Symbian OS handset shipped has now reached 165 million. The average royalty per handset is now $4.80 (down from $5.20 last year following license fee reductions).

Symbian also highlighted a number of announcements that have occurred during the last quarter including:

• The usual round up of newly shipping and forthcoming devices. More than 200 different phones running Symbian have now shipped during Symbian's lifetime.
   
• Announcement of FreePlay, ScreenPlay and Symmetric Multi-Processing.
  
• Motorola taking a 50% stake in UIQ.
  
• The usual ecosystem metrics: 8,314 third party Symbian applications commercially available, an increase of 36% on the year to 30 September 2006.
   
• Symbian OS market share of devices running on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA network in Japan grew from 50% to 65% in the year to June 30th.
   
• Opening of a Chinese R&D lab by Symbian and activities with Chinese universities in the Symbian Academy program.
  

Nigel Clifford, Symbian's CEO, said:

"Symbian continues to lead the global smartphone market in Q3 2007 with our licensees shipping 20.4 million Symbian smartphones worldwide resulting in a healthy growth of 56% since Q3 last year. Our licensees, the world's leading handset manufacturers, have now shipped 165 million Symbian smartphones cumulatively and are benefiting from the performance and features of Symbian OS while being able to substantially differentiate their devices. Licensees are using Symbian OS as their preferred operating system for the next generation of converged mobile devices and continue to deploy Symbian OS in mass market phones."

Further information and statistics are available in the press release .