Nokia News, Symbian News
Symbian operating system that characterizes the popular Nokia phones, it becomes open-source and free. Symbian Foundation, met, already planning the future of his “renewed” OS.
It was June 24, 2008 when Nokia announced the acquisition of British company Symbian, which is developing the operating system for smartphones namesake. At the same time, the Symbian Foundation was created with the support of some telephone companies like AT & T, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone and chip makers like Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics mobile. Almost 200 telephone operators were added to the foundation.
Almost 12 years after the creation of Symbian, the first version of open-source and free operating system will be published within a few days, four months ahead of schedule originally planned. Result: all the producers who want to use on your Symbian phone cellualre can install this OS without any license. According to Lee Williams, director of the foundation based in London, the conversion from proprietary software to open-source solution is an important step for everyone.
Symbian operating system is now integrated in more than 330 million mobile phones in the world. The availability of source code would allow a proliferation of mobile handsets that have this OS, from smartphones to tablet, following the footsteps of Google for its Android. But according to Lee Williams, the mobile system to Google is not truly “open”. “Only one third of the source code for Android is open. No more. The only things open-source middleware are. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”
In addition, the Symbian operating system gives greater visibility to the proposals in the coming months. “We are the only ones to engage on a development until 2011. All this may influence the roadmap and contribute to new functionality,” he adds. The Symbian OS ^ 3 should be offered in open-source version. The first terminal will be launched by summer 2010. Lee Williams has stated, in December 2009 that “Symbian and Symbian ^ 3 ^ 4 integrates well 664 new features. The system Symbian already has 40 million to 50 million lines of code.” All are now available open source.
