History
For history of Symbian prior to the agreement to merge and integrate the various Symbian versions, see
; after this integration, Symbian OS is referred to as the Symbian platform.
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.
In December 2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS; consequently, Nokia became the major contributor to Symbian's code, since it then possessed the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Since then Nokia has been maintaining its own code repository for the platform development, regularly releasing its development to the public repository.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 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 it would take over the stewardship of the Symbian platform. Symbian Foundation will remain the trademark holder and licensing entity and will only have non-executive directors involved.
On February 11, 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft which would see it adopt Windows Phone 7 for smartphones, reducing the number of devices running Symbian over the coming two years. As a consequence, the use of the Symbian platform for building mobile applications dropped rapidly. A June 2011 research indicated that over 39% of mobile developers using Symbian at the time of publication, were planning to abandon the platform.
By April 5, 2011, Nokia ceased to open source any portion of the Symbian software and reduced its collaboration to a small group of pre-selected partners in Japan. Source code released under the EPL remains available in third party repositories.
Version history
Symbian releases are styled Symbian^1, Symbian^2 etc. (vocalised as "Symbian one", "Symbian two").
Symbian^1, being 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 in 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 like a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture, UI improvements, and support for external displays via HDMI. It has single tap menus and up to three customizable homescreens. The Symbian^3 SDK (Software Development Kit) was released September 2010.
Six smartphones with the Symbian^3 operating system have been released so far; the Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia E7-00, Nokia C7-00, Nokia E6, and Nokia X7.
Symbian Anna is an update to Symbian^3, released by Nokia in April 2011 as part of the launch of the X7 and E6 smartphones. Symbian Anna includes such improvements as a new browser, a virtual keyboard in portrait orientation, new icons and real-time homescreen scrolling.Nokia has indicated that the Anna update will be also be available for existing Symbian^3 devices such as the N8 and C7.
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 in a separate release. Instead, many of the UI enhancements planned for Symbian^4 will be released as updates to Symbian^3.
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. When more applications 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
Main articles: S60 browser and Opera Mobile
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). Some older Symbian models have Opera Mobileas their default browser.
Nokia plans to introduce a new Qt-based browser as a free firmware update for Symbian^3 devices and selected older models.
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 using Python (see Python for S60), Adobe Flash or Java ME.
Symbian OS previously used a Symbian specific C++ version along with Carbide.c++ integrated development environment (IDE) as the native application development environment.
Web Runtime (WRT) is a portable application framework that allows creating widgets on the S60 Platform; it is an extension to the S60 WebKit based browser that allows launching multiple browser instances as separate JavaScript applications.
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