The Symbian Foundation laid out an aggressive roadmap for its operating system. The foundation envisions a new update of the platform every six months.

The first unified release of the new software, called Symbian^2, developed by the foundation will be "functionally complete" by the middle of 2009 and bug-free by the end of the year, according to the Foundation. That schedule will continue with successive updates every six months into 2011.

In February, Nokia said it had received a $640 million five-year loan agreement with a European investment bank to fund software research and development projects to make Symbian-based smartphones more competitive.

Seventy-eight companies have now pledged their support for the Symbian Foundation, and the Foundation got a boost of support with several companies joining before last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

For more:
- see this article [1]

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