Posts tagged symbian
Symbian OS to be Open Source
Feb 4th
The source code for the ten-year old Symbian platform will be completely open source and available for free starting Thursday. The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history, claims the Symbian Foundation.
“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”
Symbian OS
Symbian, which powers most of Nokia’s phones, has been shipped in more than 330 million devices worldwide. But in the last few years, Symbian has seen more than its fair share of changes. In 2008, Nokia, one of Symbian’s largest customers, acquired a major share in the company. Nokia then created the Symbian Foundation to distribute the platform as an open source project, and began the process of opening up the source code that year.
Meanwhile, the operating system has seen new rivals crop up. Google’s Android, which is based on a Linux kernel, has become a favorite among handset makers such as Motorola and HTC. And it’s based on an open source foundation too.
Symbian’s move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet.
Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Williams.
“About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”
Symbian is also ahead of Android in that it will publish its platform roadmap and planned features up to 2011, he says. And anyone can influence that roadmap or contribute to new features.
“Open source is also about open governance,” says Williams. “It’s about letting someone other than one control point guide the feature set and the asset base.”
But will that be enough for Symbian to steal away customers lured by a snazzier and younger rival?
iPhone pulls ahead of Windows Mobile
Dec 22nd
Apple have pulled ahead of Microsoft in terms of smartphone market share, according to a comScore report detailing October’s US mobile traffic. The research firm has been tracking month-by-month usage across multiple platforms, and while RIM still leads the way with roughly 15m devices in use, the iPhone has pulled ahead of Windows Mobile’s roughly 7m devices by around 2m.
iPhone vs Windows Mobile
The gap was narrowed back in July, and Microsoft’s sluggish growth between then and October has left them floundering behind Apple’s significant climb in numbers. Google’s Android platform and Symbian are both trailing at the back, while Palm has around a third of Apple’s numbers. Read the rest of this entry »
Video Calls on Symbian
Nov 25th
You all know Fring, the application that brings Skype, ICQ, Facebook and other services to your mobile phones, right? Up until now you were able to chat with your pals and to make voice calls but as of today you can also take things to a new level. Enter mobile video calls through Skype.
Just a few days back the Fring app was made compatible with the smartphones powered by Android OS but today’s news is an even greater break-through.
Unfortunately, the Skype video call capabilities will be available to a limited number of supported devices (all of them are Nokia smartphones). Those include the touchscreen equipped Nokia X6, N97, N97 mini and 5800 as well as Nokia N95, N95 8GB and N82.
And here is a short clip showing the video call capable Fring in action:
