Symbian Ltd. announced the introduction of POSIX libraries on Symbian OS, thus providing an easier way to port existing desktop and server components as well as mobile applications from other platforms onto Symbian OS. POSIX, short for Portable Operating System Interface for Unix, is an IEEE standard defining application programming interface for software compatible with several versions of the Unix operating system.

"What we hope to do with this is bring more developers to the platform and get them to do more," said Erik Jacobson, product manager at Symbian.

The standard will enable C programmers to easily migrate existing applications onto Symbian OS, instead of having to recode the applications for the operating system's API's. The new POSIX APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries, including libc, libm and libdl and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS in order to optimize performance and memory usage.

The standard is also meant to encourage the development of applications for mobile phones. Popular sharing applications such as eMule and Azureus could also be made available for customers using Symbian OS powered mobile phones. While many mobile phones today come with WiFi support, a mobile file sharing application could turn out to be quite useful and popular.

"We haven't thought of all the ideas that are going to happen," Jacobson said. "We're trying to allow innovation to happen. Hopefully we'll see some interesting and new exciting applications coming out."

The first version of POSIX support will become available in early February while new applications will start appearing throughout this year.