Rumor had it Samsung would be dropping the Symbian OS with the adoption of its new Bada OS. This turns out not to be the case. Speaking with Mobile Burn, a Samsung representative said:

"Samsung is an initial member of Symbian Foundation and continues to cooperate with Symbian Foundation. At the same time, Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile. To provide more choices to meet consumers' many different tastes and preferences, we will continue our 'multi-OS' strategy."

Today, Samsung is the second largest cell phone vendor behind Nokia. Meanwhile, the Symbian OS, which isn't used much in this country, is remains the most-popular smartphone platform worldwide, although it is under attack from rival like RIM with BlackBerry, Google with Android and Apple with the iPhone.

Symbian's overall lead shrank last quarter as its share fell to 46 percent, ahead of RIM and Apple, reports Canalys. Microsoft remained in fourth with its share dipping slightly below last quarter's previous low point of 9 percent. The proportion of smartphones running Google's Android OS climbed to almost 4 percent, from just under 3 percent in the second quarter. Expect that number to grow rapidly with the release of a slew of gPhones in the coming months.

Bada is Korean for "ocean" and is a name chosen "to convey the limitless variety of potential applications that can be created using the new platform," Samsung said in a statement. See here to learn more about Bada.