Buoyant Psion prepares for Symbian float

Psion announced it will float its Symbian mobile technology joint venture as it released impressive group financial results for the six months to 30 June.

Turnover across four divisions - Psion Connect, Psion Enterprise Computing, Symbian and Psion - has increased 47 per cent to £94.3m, compared with £64.2m in the same period the previous year.

Symbian, which employs 520 staff, licensed its mobile Epoc operating system to Sony earlier this year.

David Potter, chairman at Psion, said: "The results for the first half of this year demonstrate that Psion has made good progress in implementing the mobile internet strategy we have articulated over the last year."

"We continue to focus on delivering products and solutions for emerging mobile internet and wireless networking markets. We look forward to exploiting the many opportunities that our strategic investments are creating," he added.

Hand-helds and mobile computing are fast becoming flavours of the month in the business world. More and more companies are looking to integrate mobile systems into their networks, so that employees can receive emails and access client and company information from any location.

Catherine Pennington, senior research analyst for smart hand-held devices at market researcher IDC, said mobile computing is the future and predicted that resellers will benefit from this emerging market.

"The corporate space is evolving from a base of desk bound workers to an increasingly mobile workforce, and resellers are going to play a part in it," she said.

First published in Computer Reseller News