Symbian today announced the launch of Symbian OS v9.5, bringing high-performance features designed and delivering a scalable mobile operating system for the global market.

Symbian OS v9.5 is the result of continued deep collaboration with Symbian OS licensees, the world's leading handset vendors, and its user interface platform partners MOAP, S60 and UIQ. With over 110 million Symbian smartphones shipped, high smartphone growth in developing markets and increasing mass market requirements, Symbian's addressable market is broadening across segments and regions.

Delivering performance improvements with reductions in requirements on memory, processor and battery, Symbian OS v9.5 enables smartphones to run on feature phone hardware. Key memory optimization features including demand paging and automatic RAM de-fragmentation can reduce average RAM usage in excess of 25 percent, allowing for more concurrent applications for an even better user experience or enabling licensees to include less memory and reduce phone build cost.

These features and more deliver substantial benefits in the areas of performance and power usage: faster device start-up time, faster start-up time of popular applications such as browser, email and navigation by up to 75%, and improvements on the already highly competitive battery life of Symbian smartphones.

Symbian OS v9.5 introduces standardized support for digital TV and location-based services (LBS) making it cheaper and easier to bring these popular services to the mass market. The introduction of a SQL database offers developers a well known interface for storing and retrieving high-cardinality application data. This, together with integrated P.I.P.S. – P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian OS - helps developers port existing applications from the desktop or server environment to Symbian OS with minimal effort and in less time.

Symbian smartphones based on Symbian OS v9.5 will support rich multimedia experiences with advanced camera features similar to standalone digital cameras. The 35 new camera features include support for tilt sensors, preset image enhancements, panorama stitching, and red-eye reduction.

With improved seamless connectivity to home computers, enabling the easy transfer of music, videos and images using MTP, one smartphone can replace several devices. In addition, with support for multi-standard digital TV (DVB-H, ISDB-T) and standardized LBS, the Symbian smartphone will bring true convergence to consumers worldwide.

New Symbian smartphones will enable users to be more productive and cost effective with Wi-Fi to 3G connection roaming. Professionals will benefit from push-email and VoIP run over Wi-Fi when in the office and automatically switch to 3G when on the move. In addition, real-time networking ensures that VoIP services are not interrupted when other IP-based services, such as web browsing or push email, make a connection.

Symbian OS v9.5 offers contacts hosted in SQL, providing better support for large database search performances, ideal for customer-facing professionals that store thousands of contacts in their phones. Support for the new GEO property will encourage innovative use of meeting location with positioning/LBS. The interoperability of calendars with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes has been upgraded and support for Exchange ActiveSync Protocol (OTA) continues to deliver remote email, contacts and calendar synchronization.

The introduction of Brahmic script support in Symbian OS v9.5 extends Symbian OS support of languages to cover 99% of the world's countries and the support for global standards including HSPDA, HSUPA and DVB-H as well as ISDB-T, makes Symbian OS the only true global mobile operating system powering both mass market and high-end mobile phones.