The Symbian Foundation is reported to have made great progress with the development of its operating system into open source, and Symbian^2, the first version of the platform to head in the new direction, is expected to enter the beta test phase within the following weeks. According to IT World, the platform should come to the market in new devices in about six months after the beta testing starts, which places its release somewhere at the beginning of next year.

The Symbian Foundation, created after Nokia purchased software developer Symbian, has accelerated the work on the platform and has also announced plans to transform it into open source. The upcoming operating system, Symbian^2, is expected to come with something more than what we are already accustomed to seeing in existing iterations. It seems that it will include both a new UI, which should offer users the possibility to personalize it as they want, as well as new touch features.

It looks like the new version of the software is almost complete, which means that it should be up for beta testing in the very near future. As the company puts it, the following six months represent a phase of “hardening” the software, and the only changes that will be made to it will be based on what feedback the foundation receives from manufacturers. At the same time, it seems that the Symbian Foundation has put the pedal to the metal on the Product Development Kit (PDK), which will enable phone makers to build handsets based on the platform.

As for the transition towards the open-source model of the operating system, the foundation seems determined to complete the entire process by June 2010. The main advantage that this model will offer is that developers will be able to download modules of the OS and report on the bugs they find, which will enable the foundation to polish its product even more. Unfortunately, less than 10 percent of the code is open source at the moment, yet things are about to change really quickly.