Elektrobit Group Oyj - ELEKTROBIT JOINS SERIES 60 PRODUCT CREATION COMMUNITY AS A NEW COMPETENCE CENTER
June 11, 2003
ELEKTROBIT JOINS SERIES 60 PRODUCT CREATION COMMUNITY AS A NEW COMPETENCE CENTER
Elektrobit Ltd., a subsidiary of Elektrobit Group Plc., announced today that it has signed a competence center agreement with Nokia. The agreement will give Elektrobit an opportunity to closely work with handset manufactures that have licensed the Series 60 Platform for advanced smart phones. As a Series 60 competence center and a Symbian OS Development Kit License holder Elektrobit can offer to Series 60 handset manufacturers optimized solutions in end-to-end software and hardware integration by managing from specific, customized projects to an entire Series 60 smart phone integration work.
"The Contract R&D business unit aims to offer its Original Design and Engineering (ODE) productization service concept to companies that work with wireless products and have their own distribution and marketing organization required for product launches. Together with the Group's two other business units, Test and Automation Solutions, Elektrobit is able to provide the most cost and time efficient turnkey solutions for Wireless Terminal Development & NPI processes. The Series 60 Competence Center agreement is a significant step in expanding Elektrobit ODE productization service concept into smart phone product segment", said Erkki Veikkolainen, Vice President, Elektrobit Group Plc.
"Elektrobit represents a top-tier software development company that has already a proven track-record in the industry and is therefore an excellent new member in the Series 60 Product Creation Community. Competence centers, such as Elektrobit, will benefit licensees with reduced time-to-market when developing smart phones based on the Series 60," said Jukka Riivari, Director, Sales, Nokia Mobile Software.
As the Series 60 Comptence Center, Elektrobit will be able to work with those mobile handset manufacturers who have licensed the Series 60 Platform. Nokia will provide engineering and technical support to competence centers, including access to programming interfaces and early releases of new and evolving functionalities.
The Series 60 Product Creation Community consists of leading semiconductor, software integration, and consulting companies. Its mission is to provide development resources available handset manufacturers as needed throughout their respective projects. The Series 60 Competence Centers are comprised of companies with the software and hardware integration skills needed in the product creation process.
The Series 60 Platform is a software product for smart phones that Nokia licenses to other mobile-handset manufacturers. Manufacturers will be able to integrate the Series 60 Platform into their own phone designs running on top of the Symbian OS. The Series 60 includes mobile browsing, multimedia messaging and content downloading, as well as a host of personal information management and telephony applications. In addition, the software platform includes a complete and modifiable user interface library. The Series 60 Platform is licensed by Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo, Siemens and Nokia.
Oulu, June 11, 2003
Elektrobit Group Plc.
Juha Sipilä
CEO
