36 Facts About Symbian

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones.

Symbian was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd.

Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed.

Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia.

The non-profit Symbian Foundation was then created to make a royalty-free successor to Symbian OS.

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Symbian^2 was used by NTT DoCoMo, one of the members of the Foundation, for the Japanese market.

Symbian^3 was released in 2010 as the successor to S60 5th Edition, by which time it became fully free software.

Symbian Foundation disintegrated in late 2010 and Nokia took back control of the OS development.

Symbian originated from EPOC32, an operating system created by Psion in the 1990s.

The platform was designated as the successor to Symbian OS, following the official launch of the Symbian Foundation in April 2009.

The Symbian platform was officially made available as Free software in February 2010.

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.

The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase moved to Free software 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 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 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 platform.

Accenture will provide Symbian-based software development and support services to Nokia through 2016; about 2, 800 Nokia employees became Accenture employees as of October 2011.

Symbian has had a native graphics toolkit since its inception, known as AVKON.

Symbian^3 includes the Qt framework, which is the recommended user interface toolkit for new applications.

Symbian was the first mobile platform to make use of WebKit.

Symbian had strong localization support enabling manufacturers and 3rd party application developers to localize Symbian based products to support global distribution.

NET compact framework for Symbian, which is developed by redFIVElabs, is sold as a commercial product.

Symbian development is possible on Linux and macOS using tools and methods developed by the community, partly enabled by Symbian releasing the source code for key tools.

Java ME applications for Symbian OS are developed using standard techniques and tools such as the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit.

Symbian's design is subdivided into technology domains, each of which comprises a set of software packages.

Each technology domain has its own roadmap, and the Symbian Foundation has a team of technology managers who manage these technology domain roadmaps.

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Symbian OS was created with three systems design principles in mind:.

Further, all Symbian 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.

Symbian has a microkernel architecture, which means that the minimum necessary is within the kernel to maximise robustness, availability and responsiveness.

Symbian is designed to emphasise compatibility with other devices, especially removable media file systems.

Unlike Android OS's cosmetic GUIs, Symbian GUIs are referred to as "platforms" due to more significant modifications and integrations.

Symbian 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.

In November 2010, Smartphone blog All About Symbian criticized the performance of Symbian's default web browser and recommended the alternative browser Opera Mobile.

Symbian OS is subject to a variety of viruses, the best known of which is Cabir.

One million Symbian phones were shipped in Q1 2003, with the rate increasing to one million a month by the end of 2003.

Basic capabilities are user-grantable and developers can self-sign them, while more advanced capabilities require certification and signing via the Symbian Signed program, which uses independent 'test houses' and phone manufacturers for approval.

In October 2012, the Nokia Belle Feature Pack 2, widely considered the last major update for Symbian, was released for Nokia 603, 700, 701, and 808 PureView.