Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Birdstep Technology of Oslo aims to tap into the local skills base in wireless design and in particular knowledge of the Symbian OS, which was largely developed in the UK by Psion.
The company chose Cambridge as the location for this development group because its sees it as “an innovative environment… which attracts the right type of profiles required for technology development on the Symbian platform”.
“By opening an office in Cambridge, we will be able to focus on this market and establish an engineering team with four experts having Symbian platform expertise by July 1,” said Jorgen Bredesen, CEO of Birdstep Technology.
The centre will be headed up by former Symbian designer Thomas Horsten. His experience includes adapting the Symbian reference platform for specific manufacturers.
So-called smartphones, which combine mobile and wireless LAN capabilities, are being developed by suppliers such as Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Sendo and Sony Ericsson. First handsets could be on the market as available as the fourth quarter of this year.
Birdstep has Windows-based software called Mobile IP which manages mobile phone operation on more than one network by finding the optimum connection on cost and bandwidth grounds.
The company is also collaborating with handset firm Alcatel and smartcard supplier Gemplus on the development mobile handset software which will manage the connection to various GSM/GPRS/EDGE, wideband-CDMA mobile networks, WLAN and even WiMAX using secure links.
