Acorn Group plc has announced that Korea's largest electronics company, Samsung, has signed a licensing agreement for an Acorn operating system (OS) solution and Acorn TVCentric™ technology. Hundreds of thousands of Samsung products will use Acorn's technology, bringing low cost, state of the art devices to thousands of homes around the world.

Samsung's RISC OS "armed" consumer appliances will be connected to a TV, displaying high quality images, text and full motion video at a low cost using Acorn's TVCentric technology. System software including graphics libraries, font and graphical user interface technology is included in the agreement.

Daniel Oh, Manager of the Samsung Next Generation Platform Group explained, "We need to work with flexible people who can offer us the technology we need at the right time. Acorn TVCentric™ technologies are ideally suited to consumer devices which use TV based displays and Acorn's existing designs should give us the time-to-market advantage we are looking for."

Mark Phillips, Technologies Marketing Manager for Acorn, added, "This agreement is further evidence of Acorn's success in providing technology to the global consumer electronics market. It shows once again that Acorn's operating systems and applications software are ideally suited for consumer devices being produced by major corporations. Acorn is again successfully licensing its technology to a major player. Samsung has a history of only choosing the best technologies to incorporate into its products and this has contributed to its dominant position in the Korean electronics market and we are pleased to be part of its portfolio."

Samsung will use Acorn's solutions to integrate a wide range of customised applications into its new range of consumer appliance products. These features include: Anti-aliased, scalable fonts for high definition text, anti-twitter software for stable text, images and video, software programmable video resolution, colour depth and scan rates, and graphics overlay support including semi-transparancies.

Acorn has recently announced the availability of its 16-bit font, RISCafé™ and Java Virtual Machine technologies as well as Acorn eXtend™ which provides Microsoft Windows support on systems running RISC OS.

About Acorn

Acorn Group plc, head-quartered in Cambridge, UK, is one of the world's leading developers and suppliers of innovative technology designs and consultancy. Acorn is at the core of some of the world's best digital technology products.