When the Nokia N8 arrives, it will be Nokia’s first device to run Symbian^3, the Symbian Foundation’s newest mobile platform, and their first entirely open source release.
If you’ve used a Nokia smartphone in the past 10 years you’ve used Symbian, the platform that powers Nokia’s smartphones, as well as those of several other device manufacturers. With more than two-fifths of the worldwide smartphone market share, Symbian is by far the world’s most used smartphone platform. To understand just how dominant Symbian is, that means that out of all the smartphones in the world, a little less than half run Symbian, and the other half run a mobile OS from one of about four major competitors. During Q1 of 2010, roughly 260,000 Symbian devices were shipped globally every day: an average of just over 3 phones a second. Symbian^3 is the next evolution of the Symbian platform, introducing improvements and features such as HDMI support, touch gestures, and multiple, 3D-accelerated home screens (a more comprehensive feature list can be found here).
The Benefits of Being Open
Right now, you must be thinking, “Great, but how is any of this of benefit to me?” Essentially, by becoming open source, the Symbian platform will be able to evolve and improve more quickly than has been possible in the past, as anyone in the world will be able to suggest and contribute modifications or improvements to the platform. Symbian already multiple programming languages and application environments, including Qt – now it will be easier than ever to write programs for Symbian, as programmers have access to the system’s complete source code. For one, this will allow them to integrate their programs into the platform in ways not possible in a closed system. Also, by reading the source code, programmers will be able to create more cohesive and elegant code.
An open-source approach allows users to be more pro-active with their devices as well. For example, as Ovi Suite is currently Windows only, many users find it difficult to sync data between a Nokia phone and a Mac/Linux machine. Now that the codebase is open source, someone will be able to come along, look at the operating system’s sync mechanisms, and write their own solution to interface Symbian and the personal information manager of their choice.
When the Symbian Foundation released its entire codebase as open source (tens of millions of lines of code) a full four months ahead of schedule, it was an amazing feat. Here at Nokia, we’re excited about the experience that the new open source Symbian^3 platform promises to deliver on our new Nokia N8 device.
No comments:
Post a Comment