Symbian has announced the establishment of a global R&D center in Beijing.

    The center is Symbian's fourth R&D center with the others located in the United Kingdom and India. The new facility will play a key role in the company's continuing development of Symbian OS. Symbian OS is licensed to the world's leading handset manufacturers and to date, over 145 million Symbian smartphones have been sold worldwide to more than 250 major network operators. Symbian says it leads the market with a global market share of 72 percent of the smartphone OS market during the second quarter of 2007.

    Symbian has also announced that seven Chinese companies have joined the Symbian Platinum Program, a partnership scheme which represents key technology innovators and service providers in the mobile industry. Symbian also unveiled details for a local Symbian Academy program in collaboration with several local universities. The Symbian Academy is designed to facilitate universities creating courses that teach Symbian software development and to introduce a Symbian program into existing computer science courses.

    The partners joining the Symbian Platinum Program are: Aspire Holdings, Ltd., Intromobile Co., Ltd., Leadtone Wireless, Ltd., Beijing Netqin Tech Co., Ltd., Tencent Technology Ltd., Simlife Science & Technology Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Temobi Science & Tech Development Co., Ltd.

    The six Chinese universities involved with Symbian Academy are: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beihang University, Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tongji University, Nanjing University and Daqing Petroleum Institute. Approximately 800 Chinese students have been trained under this program to date with numbers expecting to double by the end of the year. Currently the global Symbian Academy Program offers coursework and developer materials to students in 32 universities in 14 countries.