Symbian is the world’s largest mobile phone operating system. It lives in hundreds of millions of handsets globally, holding a 60% market share. That’s three times the market share of RIM Blackberry, and five times that of Windows Mobile.In June 2008, Nokia acquired the rights to Symbian, with the intention of making it open source. That means that Nokia agreed to release the Symbian code, creating a “royalty-free open platform [to] accelerate innovation.” To help make this happen, they created the Symbian Foundation, a not-for-profit entity that will manage the Symbian platform, and maintain relationships with its partners and contributors.

Although Symbian wasn’t going to change its name, it was changing into a new company, offering a fundamentally different proposition. Because of its legacy, Symbian came with a lot of baggage – a lot of well-established preconceptions about what it was and what it did. And, there’s the fact that most end consumers had no familiarity with the brand, something the Foundation was keen to change.

Symbian needed a brand that built on its existing equities as a trusted market leader, while signaling its fresh start in a compelling and exciting way.

Symbian was only very recently launched at the GSMA World Congress, and was well received by the audience.

Anecdotal evidence is included in our Symbian video entry.

The new identity, launched on the 2nd April 2009, captures the essence of the open source spirit, championing collaboration, creativity, freedom and community.

While the rest of the field is slick, sophisticated and standoffish, Symbian breaks category convention, using hand drawn illustrations and a heart within the identity system to express the humanity in their technology. It’s open and friendly. It’s human and personable. And Symbian can now engage in a dialogue with both developers and end consumers alike.

After all, a conversation isn’t very fun if it’s only one-sided, is it?