Depending on who you ask, they’ll say Symbian is either up or down. In its second-quarter results released today, it shipped 19.6 million units, a 5 percent increase over the same period a year ago. In the first half, shipments jumped 10 percent to 38.1 million compared to 2007. It was these results that led GigaOm to report that Symbian “has met the iPhone challenge and is still on top.” As further explained “that happens when you have 159 devices shipping with your operating system and are a mainstay OS for Nokia (NYSE: NOK), which has captured 39.5 percent of the handset market.” However, based on the exact same numbers, Reuters makes an entirely different conclusion, by saying that the economic slowdown is weighing heavily on demand for multimedia phones. For instance, when you take a look at the 5 percent growth rate this quarter and compare it to the 17 percent in the first quarter, and the 50 percent growth rate the company saw in late 2007, it sounds like the OS is on a downward slide.

—Royalties Fade: Symbian has been trying to reverse this downward trend for awhile. Nokia owns 48 percent of Symbian, and offered to buy out the other shareholders in June for 264 million euros ($387 million). Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) immediately agreed, and today Nokia said that the final shareholder Samsung agreed to the buy-out, as well. Already, Symbian has been slashing royalty rates to encourage adoption, as the intention of making the software open source. In the second quarter, royalties totaled 32.9 million pounds, representing a drop of 18 percent compared to the year-ago period.

—Symbian Is Still Everywhere: It’s hard to dispute Symbian’s pervasiveness. At the end of the first half, it had 159 Symbian phone models in the market, 249 in total since inception, eight licensees using the OS and 92 phone models in development. Plus, with applications now being a sign of success among developers, Symbian counts 9,834 commercially available applications (compared to the 2,000-or-so applications for the iPhone).

—The Outlook: Symbian’s CEO Nigel Clifford wouldn’t provide any concrete estimates on Symbian’s outlook, but did offer this commentary: “For the past ten years, helping our customers succeed has been our number one priority. We believe we have remained number one because we’re the only company in our industry that is built from the ground up to create what might be described as a ‘pure, open mobile OS’ for the good of the industry in consultation with our partners and licensees.