Symbian

What is Symbian?

Symbian is an open source operating system (OS) and software platform designed for smartphones and maintained by Nokia. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60; unlike Symbian OS, which required an additional user interface system, Symbian includes a user interface component based on S60 5th Edition. The latest version, Symbian^3, was officially released in Q4 2010, first used in the Nokia N8.
Symbian OS was originally developed by Symbian Ltd. It is a descendant of Psion's EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed.
Devices based on Symbian accounted for 43.5% of worldwide smartphone sales in 2010 Q2. Some estimates indicate that the cumulative number of mobile devices shipped with the Symbian OS up to the end of Q2 2010 is 385 million.

History 

The Symbian platform was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., including Symbian OS assets at its core, the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces.
Symbian was intended to be developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation, which was first announced in June 2008 and which officially launched in April 2009. Its objective was to publish the source code for the entire Symbian platform under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase transitioned to Open Source in history .
However, some important components within Symbian OS were licensed from third parties, which prevented the foundation from publishing the full source under EPL immediately; instead much of the source was published under a more restrictive Symbian Foundation License (SFL) and access to the full source code was limited to member companies only, although membership was open to any organisation.
In December 2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS; as a result, Nokia has become the major contributor to Symbian's code, as it now had the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Since then, Nokia has been maintaining their own code repository for the platform development, regularly releasing their development to the public repository.
In November 2010, the Symbian Foundation announced that due to a lack of support from funding members, it would transition to a licensing-only organisation; Nokia announced that it will take over the stewardship of the Symbian platform. Symbian Foundation will remain as the trademark holder and licensing entity and will only have non-executive directors involved.

Version

Symbian releases are styled Symbian^1, Symbian^2 etc. (vocalised as "Symbian one", "Symbian two").
Symbian^1, as the first release, forms the basis for the platform. It incorporates Symbian OS and S60 5th Edition (which is built on Symbian OS 9.4) and thus it was not made available as open source.
Symbian^2 was the first royalty-free version of Symbian. While portions of Symbian^2 are EPL licensed, most of the source code is under the proprietary SFL license and available only to members of the Symbian Foundation. On June 1, 2010, a number of Japanese companies including DoCoMo and Sharp announced smartphones using Symbian^2.
Symbian^3 was announced on 15 February 2010. It was designed to be a more ‘next generation’ smartphone platform. The Symbian^3 release introduced new features such as a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture, UI improvements, and support for external displays through HDMI. It has single tap menus and up to three customizable homescreens. The Symbian^3 SDK was released September 2010.
Four phones with the open source Symbian^3 have been released, the Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia E7-00 and Nokia C7-00.
Symbian^4 was expected to be released in the first half of 2011. However, Nokia announced in October 2010 that Symbian^4 will not ship as a separate release. Instead, improvements to Symbian will be delivered as software updates to all current Symbian^3 devices.

Features

User interface

Symbian has had a native graphics toolkit since its inception, known as AVKON (formerly known as Series 60). S60 was designed to be manipulated by a keyboard-like interface metaphor, such as the ~15-key augmented telephone keypad, or the mini-QWERTY keyboards. AVKON-based software is binary-compatible with Symbian versions up to and including Symbian^3.
Symbian^3 includes the Qt framework, which is now the recommended user interface toolkit for new applications. Qt can also be installed on older Symbian devices.
Symbian^4 was planned to introduce a new GUI library framework specifically designed for a touch-based interface, known as "UI Extensions for Mobile" or UIEMO (internal project name "Orbit"), which was built on top of Qt; a preview was released in January 2010, however in October 2010 Nokia announced that Orbit/UIEMO has been cancelled.
Nokia currently recommends that developers use Qt Quick with QML, the new high-level GUI and scripting framework for creating visually rich touchscreen interfaces that allows development for both Symbian and MeeGo; it will be delivered to existing Symbian^3 devices as a Qt update. As more applications will gradually feature a user interface reworked in Qt, the legacy S60 framework (AVKON) will be deprecated and no longer included with new devices at some point, thus breaking binary compatibility with older S60 applications

Browser


Symbian^3 and earlier have a native WebKit based browser; indeed, Symbian was the first mobile platform to make use of WebKit (in June 2005).
Nokia plans to introduce a new Qt-based browser as a free update for Symbian^3 devices.

Application Development

From 2010, Symbian switched to using standard C++ with Qt as the SDK, which can be used with either Qt Creator or Carbide. Qt supports the older Symbian S60 3rd and 5th editions, as well as the new Symbian platform. It also supports Maemo and Meego, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Alternative application development can be done with using Python (see Python for S60), Adobe Flash or Java ME.
Symbian OS previously used a Symbian specific C++ version along with Carbide.c++ IDE as the native application development environment
Web Runtime (WRT) is a portable application framework that allows the creation of widgets on the S60 Platform; it is an extension to the S60 Webkit based browser that allows to launch multiple instances of the browser as separate JavaScript applications.

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