Symbian OS is a discontinued mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones.
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Symbian OS is a discontinued mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones.
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Symbian OS was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian OS Ltd.
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Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed.
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Symbian OS was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia.
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Symbian OS platform is formed of two components: one being the microkernel-based operating system with its associated libraries, and the other being the user interface, which provides the graphical shell atop the OS.
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Symbian OS^2 was used by NTT DoCoMo, one of the members of the Foundation, for the Japanese market.
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Symbian OS^3 was released in 2010 as the successor to S60 5th Edition, by which time it became fully free software.
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Symbian OS Foundation disintegrated in late 2010 and Nokia took back control of the OS development.
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Symbian OS originated from EPOC32, an operating system created by Psion in the 1990s.
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The platform was designated as the successor to Symbian OS, following the official launch of the Symbian Foundation in April 2009.
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The Symbian OS platform was officially made available as Free software in February 2010.
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Symbian OS was intended to be developed by a community led by the Symbian OS Foundation, which was first announced in June 2008 and which officially launched in April 2009.
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The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian OS Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase moved to Free software in history.
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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 and access to the full source code was limited to member companies only, although membership was open to any organisation.
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In November 2010, the Symbian OS Foundation announced that due to changes in global economic and market conditions, it would transition to a licensing-only organisation; Nokia announced it would take over the stewardship of the Symbian OS platform.
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Symbian OS has had a native graphics toolkit since its inception, known as AVKON .
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Symbian OS^3 includes the Qt framework, which is the recommended user interface toolkit for new applications.
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Symbian OS had strong localization support enabling manufacturers and 3rd party application developers to localize Symbian OS based products to support global distribution.
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NET compact framework for Symbian OS, which is developed by redFIVElabs, is sold as a commercial product.
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Symbian OS development is possible on Linux and macOS using tools and methods developed by the community, partly enabled by Symbian OS releasing the source code for key tools.
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Symbian OS's design is subdivided into technology domains, each of which comprises a set of software packages.
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Each technology domain has its own roadmap, and the Symbian OS Foundation has a team of technology managers who manage these technology domain roadmaps.
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Symbian OS kernel supports sufficiently fast real-time response to build a single-core phone around it – that is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack.
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Symbian OS was created with three systems design principles in mind:.
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Further, all Symbian OS programming is event-based, and the central processing unit is switched into a low power mode when applications are not directly dealing with an event.
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Symbian OS has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel to maximise robustness, availability and responsiveness.
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Symbian OS is designed to emphasise compatibility with other devices, especially removable media file systems.
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Unlike Android OS's cosmetic GUIs, Symbian OS GUIs are referred to as "platforms" due to more significant modifications and integrations.
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Symbian OS has lost market share over the years as the market has dramatically grown, with new competing platforms entering the market, though its sales have increased during the same timeframe.
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In November 2010, Smartphone blog All About Symbian OS criticized the performance of Symbian OS's default web browser and recommended the alternative browser Opera Mobile.
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Symbian OS is subject to a variety of viruses, the best known of which is Cabir.
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One million Symbian OS phones were shipped in Q1 2003, with the rate increasing to one million a month by the end of 2003.
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Basic capabilities are user-grantable and developers can self-sign them, while more advanced capabilities require certification and signing via the Symbian OS Signed program, which uses independent 'test houses' and phone manufacturers for approval.
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