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Earlier this year, Symbian celebrated the development of the 100th phone model built on its eponymous smartphone platform. Today, the mobile operating system provider announced it surpassed the 100 million mark for number handsets shipped running the Symbian OS.

Symbian, which formed in 1998, rang in the new millennium with the Ericsson R380, the first Symbian smartphone, six years ago. It took two years for the company to move its first 1 million handsets and only four more to add another 99 million to that tally—37 million this year alone so far, with 13 million of those shipping during the third quarter.

BenQ, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo, Sharp, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson have all shipped Symbian handsets. Nokia, which has built 44 Symbian smartphones (and counting), accounts for about 70 million of the first 100 million.

According to Canalys Research, Symbian holds 68 percent of the smartphone market, Microsoft Windows Mobile 15 percent, and RIM BlackBerry 6 percent. Linux and the Palm OS, for the most part, accounted for the rest. Nokia shipped 51 percent of all smartphones worldwide. And nearly all of those used the number one phone maker's S60 interface, which runs on top of the Symbian OS.

Manufacturers who build Symbian-based handsets add a second interface layer-usually Nokia's S60 interface, but sometimes UIQ-to provide some of their smartphones functionality, look, and feel. So, in essence - to use a housing metaphor - Symbian is the foundation, plumbing, and electrical system; the interface is the furnishings and appliances; and the hardware is the frame upon which the smartphone is built.

Recently, Sony Ericsson, which builds most of the UIQ-based smartphones on the market, bought itself more control over the phone interface (similar to Nokia with S60) when it acquired UIQ technology from Symbian. This will save Sony Ericsson the trouble and expense of paying licensing fees as well. UIQ Technology will continue to operate independently once the acquisition is completed. In addition, as Nokia does somewhat unsuccessfully with S60, the UIQ platform will still be available for license to other phone vendors.

IDC's Andy Brown predicts that cumulative sales of smartphones will reach over 1 billion units by 2011. He said, "The smartphone segment of the handset market is seeing strong annual growth and is expected to rise from 57 million units in 2005 to around 250 million units by the end of 2010. The advent of single chip designs will inevitably attract a growing number of licensees and drive greater penetration into the mid-market."

For example, at 3GSM earlier this year, Symbian announced a new 3G phone reference design using Freescale's single core modem targeted to run Nokia's S60 interface. The aim: to make these phones more attractive to end-users and industry players. To further encourage manufacturers, Symbian also cut licensing fees for its operating system by half.

"Symbian is focused on reducing development costs and improving performance for our customers' mid-tier low-cost phones," said the platform developer's VP of product management & strategy Jorgen Behrens at the time. "The results of this collaboration with Freescale, Nokia and Symbian will encourage handset manufacturers to develop more 3G phones and significantly shorten their time to market."

Symbian is launching its first coding competition called Symbian Hundred Million Phones: Because of the Code. The contest is open to all Symbian software developers and involves submitting 100 lines of Symbian C++ code. The competition will run through January 7th and the authors of the top 100 code samples will be awarded a smartphone, a free Accredited Symbian Developer exam sitting, a Symbian Signed test-run, two Symbian books, an invitation to the Symbian party at 3GSM and a bag of gifts.

6,120 third party applications for Symbian smartphones are now commercially available, up by 39 percent from the same period last year.

In July, Symbian introduced version 9.3 of the operating system. This incremental ugrade adds native support for Wi-Fi, push-to-talk, USB 2.0 on-the-go, and FOTA (Firmware Over The Air); all previously added to Symbian handsets by licensees.

There's also native unlicensed mobile access (UMA) integration to better enable Wi-Fi-enabled phones to automatically switch between unlicensed 802.11 spectrum and licensed cellular networks when making and receiving phone calls. New HSPDA support means the platform will be ready for the next generation 3G networks starting to roll out now.

In order to make the OS more attractive to the mainstream, Symbian said performance and start-up times for phones and key applications were improved as well. The upgrade is also fully backwards compatible with earlier editions in the v.9 family. So software that runs on earlier Symbian smartphones will also work on upcoming 9.3 models too.