The partnership between the companies was announced at the Symbian Smartphone Show that opened here Tuesday (Oct.17).

The application is expected to be ready during the fourth quarter of the year, and its availability will be extended to the U.S. shortly thereafter.

The Slingbox made its long anticipated European debut in May of this year.

The SlingPlayer Mobile for Symbian OS software package will allow users to transform their supported Symbian smartphones on S60 and UIQ into on-the-go digital TVs providing always available access to their living room television.

Any program that can be watched at home will be viewable through a Slingbox on supported Symbian smartphones using 3G or Wi-Fi, including support for terrestrial TV, Freeview, cable, and satellite TV.

SlingPlayer Mobile will also let users control their home personal video recorder to watch recorded shows, pause, and rewind live TV or even queue new recordings while away from home.

The Slingbox is powered by DSPs from Texas Instruments. It works on PCs running on Windows 2000, XP or MCE and Sling Media (San Mateo, Calif.) said earlier this year it planned Pocket PC, smartphone and Macintosh-compatible versions.

"Symbians market leading position drove our decision to work with them and deliver the Slingbox experience to a large mobile customer base," said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media. "I've been using a beta version of the SlingPlayer Mobile on a Symbian smartphone, and it's pure sweetness."

Symbian said at the show 82 million smartphones using its OS have been sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators. According to Gartner, the mobile software group accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2006.