Motorola adds weight to Symbian joint venture

NEWS Motorola has honoured an in-principle agreement made in June by joining the Symbian alliance. The mobile giant will invest £28.75m and gain a 23.1 per cent share of the company, matching the shares already held by Ericsson and Nokia. Psion's portion will be reduced from 40 to just over 30 per cent. The joint venture aims to promote Psion's Epoc software as the operating system of choice for smartphones. Symbian hopes users will be attracted to the economy of using Epoc - which the alliance members claim uses less power and memory Microsoft's Windows CE. Motorola will contribute its TrueSync technology, which it acquired with wireless specialist Starfish Software in July. The TrueSync software allows full interoperability of data between mobile devices and desktop PCs. Between them, Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia currently hold three-quarters of the world's mobile handset market.