"As Symbian enters the mass market with Symbian OS smartphones, we are committed to delivering the best possible platform to our customers, who in turn can offer the best possible mobile phone user experience," said Mike Whittingham, director, strategic programs, Symbian Ltd, as it was announced that Symbian is licensing source codes for Futuremark Corporation's current SPMark04 product and two forthcoming handheld benchmark products, and is also joining Futuremark's handheld benchmark development program.

"Symbian's stamp of approval of Futuremark's Smartphone Benchmark Development is evident in its joining the program," said Tero Sarkkinen, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Futuremark. "Having the world's largest smartphone operating system provider working with us as we define and implement industry standard performance gauges testifies just how important it is for the whole Symbian ecosystem to have unbiased high-quality benchmarks," Sarkkinen added.

Futuremark Corporation has created industry's first publicly available Symbian OS platform performance test suite, SPMark04. It measures the performance and power efficiency of Symbian OS-based smartphones, and includes OpenGL ES API 3D game scenes, image processing, as well as native Symbian OS applications such as address book and calendar. In addition, Futuremark is currently working on next generation OpenGL ES and mobile Java performance benchmarks.

"Futuremark's products will help Symbian and the Symbian ecosystem delivers the best in class products by offering a standard metric to measure Symbian OS phone performance from which we will all learn." Whittingham said.