Symbian Ltd.

Symbian Software Ltd.

Former type	Private
Industry	Business Software & Services
Fate	Acquired by Nokia Corporation
Founded	1998
Defunct	December 2, 2008
Headquarters	Southwark, London
Key people	Colly Myers, David Levin, Nigel Clifford
Products	Symbian OS
Number of employees	1178 (2007)
Parent	Nokia
Website	www.symbian.com

Symbian Ltd. was a software development and licensing company, known for the Symbian OS, a smartphone operating system, and other related technologies. Its headquarters were in Southwark, London, England, with other offices opened in Cambridge UK, Sweden, Silicon Valley, Japan, India, China, South Korea, Sydney Australia.

It was established on 24 June 1998 as a partnership between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, SONY and Psion to exploit the convergence between PDAs and mobile phones. Ten years to the day after it was established, on 24 June 2008, Nokia announced that they intended to acquire the shares that they did not already own, at a cost of €264 million. On the same day the Symbian Foundation was announced, with the aim to "provide royalty-free software and accelerate innovation", and the pledged contribution of the Symbian OS and user interfaces.

The acquisition of Symbian Ltd. by Nokia was completed on 2 December 2008, at which point all Symbian employees became Nokia employees. Transfer of relevant Symbian Software Ltd. leases, trademarks and domain names from Nokia to the Symbian Foundation was completed in April 2009.

On 18 July 2009, Nokia's Symbian professional services department, which was not transferred to the Symbian Foundation, was sold to the Accenture consulting company.

Symbian Ltd formerly developed and licensed Symbian OS, an operating system for advanced 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. User interface layers were provided by third parties. These included Series 60, Series 80 and Series 90 by Nokia, UIQ from UIQ Technology and MOAP(S) for NTT DoCoMo.