Both Symbian Ltd and Sun Microsystems Inc have denied reports that Sun was considering taking a 10% stake in Symbian, the company formed last week to develop portable wireless information devices as a joint venture between Psion Plc and telecommunication companies LM Ericsson Telefon AB and Nokia Oy. Psion’s share value has rocketed since the formation of Symbian last week (CI No 3,439). Rumors of the Sun investment, or of another significant partner, originated in the UK’s Observer newspaper on Sunday. But Symbian business development manager Alisdair Manson, based in San Francisco, denied the reports, and said a press conference the company is holding in San Francsico today would just be a re-run of similar events already held in London and New York. We’ve made enough announcements for now, said Manson, who nevertheless termed Sun as a close partner of Symbian. Sun itself said it had seen the report and that it was wrong. Sun is offering Symbian full support, but is making no financial contribution, a spokesperson said. Symbian is a joint venture, with Psion holding 40% and Nokia and Ericsson 30% each. Motorola Inc has also provisionally signed up to join the venture. If it were ever to happen, an investment by Sun would heighten still further the face off between Symbian’s powerful backers and Microsoft Corp over which company will control the software running networked handheld devices. The Symbian venture pitches Psion’s Epoch 32 operating system directly in competition with Microsoft Corp’s Windows CE, and Sun points out that all four participants in Symbian are Java licensees. Psion denies that Symbian is going up against Windows, claiming instead that the wireless application device market has not yet been colonized by Microsoft. But before the new venture was launched, the dominance of CE had put a major question mark over Psion’s future. á
