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NTT DoCoMo is now offering the Symbian-based F900iT smartphone for its FOMA 3G network in Japan. The F900iT is the fourth Symbian OS smartphone that has been developed by Fujitsu exclusively for NTT DoCoMo.

The FOMA F900iT joins the other seven Symbian OS-based 3G phones: the F2051, the F2102V and the F900i for FOMA and the Motorola A920, the Motorola A925 and the Motorola A1000 for European 3G markets.

The F900iT features a 1.28 megapixel camera for video and images that when folded, the camera lens and screen can be rotated outward, enabling the phone to be used as a digital camera and Web viewer. It also has touchscreen TFT color display for handwriting recognition. The display also features a 320 x 240 pixel high resolution display that supports 262,144 colors. It also has a miniSD card slot.

Symbian

Global shipments of handsets based on the Symbian platform doubled to 2.4 million in the first quarter of this year over the first quarter of 2003.

The latest version of Symbian OS, version 8.0, already released to licensees, aims to enable accelerated development of lower cost Symbian OS phones, enhanced device management, multimedia and Java capabilities At the end the first quarter, 30 phones and variants based on Symbian OS were under development by nice licensees.

According to Gartner, in 2003, more than 6.67 million smartphones based on Symbian OS were shipped worldwide. There were a total of about 10 million smartphones sold, which takes into consideration Symbian, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS and Linux. While this is a drop in the bucket compared to the over 520 million mobile phones sold worldwide last year, the overall sales of smartphones are expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. ABI Research predicts Symbian will ship on almost a quarter of all handsets by 2009. That's in a market that should top 600 million units.