Symbian's developers are making a big push into China (reports Daniel Shen at the Digitimes), with an expansion to almost 300 staff expected at their R&D Centre in Beijing. The market in Asia for smartphones is one that most western handset manufacturers have been eyeing over the years, and I'm sure that 'let's try to be big there' has been the downfall of a few companies along the way.

Symbian's relatively slow grass roots effort to build up a presence both in staffing and in third party developers - the article points out that 1 in 8 (over 12%) of Symbian third party applications originates in China. And of course Symbian doesn't have to worry about manufacturing or commodity mobile phones, they just need to get their Operating System involved. Maybe they should release older versions (Symbian OS 8 or 9.0) at a significantly lower cost to the clone factories? Yes $5 per handset is the going rate, but surely $0.50 a handset to get a massive market penetration would be a good idea?