Symbian chief sees €100 smartphones this year

First Symbian smartphones with unsubsidised prices of €100 ($136.5) will reach phone stores this year, the chief of the world's most widely used smartphone platform Symbian told Reuters in an interview.                                           

Prices of smartphones are falling fast as cellphone vendors are battling aGgressively for a larger share of the more lucrative part of the handset market                                           

"This year we will see a few products hitting that point," Lee Williams, head of the Symbian Foundation, told Reuters in an interview at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.                                           

The cheapest Nokia's Symbian phone sells now for €120 to €130 without operator subsidies.                                           

Williams said he expects the smartphone market to grow at an annual speed of around 20%.                                           

Symbian controls around half the smartphone market, but its market share has slipped since Apple and Google entered the sector.                                           

In response, Nokia bought out other Symbian shareholders in 2008 and gave its software to an independent foundation to develop on an open source basis.