Yahoo! Joins Symbian Platinum Partner Program
Symbian and Yahoo! Collaborate to Provide Mobile Consumers Anywhere, Anytime Access to Wireless Content and Entertainment on Symbian OS
3GSM World Congress, Barcelona, 14 February, 2006 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, and Symbian Limited, provider of the market leading open mobile OS, today announced that Yahoo! has joined the Symbian Platinum Program to support the growing market for Symbian OS™ phones and applications. Symbian develops and licenses Symbian OS, the leading open operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones also known as smartphones, to the world’s largest handset manufacturers.
Last month Yahoo! announced its new Yahoo! Go Mobile service which will soon launch in North America, Europe and Asia (http://go.yahoo.com). This new service provides Symbian OS phone users with access to their favorite Internet content and services. Yahoo! Go Mobile integrates the power of the Internet into consumers' mobile phone experiences by combining real-time connectivity with access to their community, information and content services from across the web.
This new service will be the first time Yahoo! has brought a comprehensive set of the company's industry-leading products and full access to services across the Web into a single application for mobile phones. From their Symbian OS mobiles, users can access Yahoo! services including Mail, Address Book, Messenger, Search, Photos News, Sports, Finance and Games. Yahoo! Go Mobile will be available for demonstration on Symbian OS phones at the Symbian stand during 3GSM 2006 at B20/B21, Hall 8.
Since utilizing Symbian OS for its Yahoo! Go Mobile service, Yahoo! has now decided to join Symbian’s Platinum Program to leverage additional technical resource to further develop the product. The rapid growth of the open OS phone market which Gartner expects to grow to 20 percent of the total phone market and Symbian’s market leading position underpinned Yahoo!’s decision to put its Yahoo! Go Mobile content and services on top of the Symbian OS. As of Q3 2005, almost 48 million Symbian phones had shipped and been deployed to over 250 major network operators worldwide.
Yahoo!
“Yahoo! sees Symbian OS and the open phone market as a tremendous opportunity to provide its services to customers worldwide,” said Christian Lindhom, vice president, global mobile products, Yahoo!. “We welcome the support provided by the Symbian Platinum Program in helping to leverage Yahoo!‘s visibility in the mobile mass market and enterprise spaces as well as with key players in the device manufacturer and mobile carrier markets.”
Symbian
"Yahoo! Go Mobile combines mass market appeal and innovative usability focus, to provide easy access to information, content and entertainment through mobile devices with Symbian OS", said Simon Garth, vice-president marketing, Symbian. "We are delighted to welcome Yahoo! to the Symbian Platinum Program thus further broadening the reach of the Symbian Ecosystem.”