China is the next Silicon Valley, proclaims Symbian Foundation director

China Mobile, also known as the mobile network with the most subscribers in the world, has put its considerable weight behind the open source mobile environment, first by offering its own Android-based Open Mobile System "OPhones," and now by teaming with The Symbian Foundation.

In a joint statement with the Symbian Foundation yesterday, China Mobile announced they will now encourage developers to create Symbian apps by including Symbian Signed services in the China Mobile Market submission process, and to support Symbian's app publishing software called Horizon. The addition of both of these services makes the submission and approval of Symbian apps much easier.

"The Symbian platform holds a strong position in China`s mobile market and we
welcome the opportunity to build our relationship with the Symbian Foundation. By entering this partnership with the foundation we hope to have greater involvement in the development of new and exciting mobile applications, thereby enabling developersto satisfy consumers` 3G requirements via our Mobile Market store and enhancing the value chain for the TD-SCDMA industry," said Lu Xiang Dong, Vice President of China Mobile.

In return, Symbian pledged support for China Mobile's TD-SCDMA 3G wireless standard which will include the development of Symbian-based TD-SCDMA devices.

Symbian Foundation director David Wood yesterday said, "In July 2006, I spent 14 days on a family holiday travelling around China. Everywhere we went, we saw evidence of vast scale. These same impressions -- scale, and rapid transition -- strike me every time I return to China. The region already hosts three of the world's top ten phone manufacturers: ZTE, Huawei, and HTC. These companies abound with ambition to make even larger impacts on the worldwide market. The network operator China Mobile comfortably heads Wikipedia's list of the world's largest network operators, with half a billion subscribers. Mix in fast-rising semiconductor vendors, energetic Internet services companies, and nimble multi-skilled design houses, along with a huge flow of highly educated engineering graduates from numerous universities around the country, eager to work hard in a vigorously competitive marketplace, and it's no surprise that people say that China is becoming the next Silicon Valley."