Symbian Platform Release Plan Unveiled

David Wood from the Symbian Foundation has recently unveiled to the world the release schedule for the open-source Symbian platform versions that should head towards users during in 2009 and 2010.

According to him, the Symbian Foundation plans to complete the development on the functionality of the Symbian^2, based on S60 5.1, while also expecting the final form of the OS to be ready before the end of the year. At the same time, it seems that the first handset to run under the platform should come to the market around the year's end, yet this would depend a lot on the manufacturers and “on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices” they make.

David Wood also says that we should see Symbian^3 coming around about six months later, meaning that, while it should become fully functional by the end of the year, the final form is only expected to be available in mid-2010.

There are three stages that any platform goes through during the development process. Before it manages to reach complete functionality, new features are added to it, while afterwards the developers work on its stability, testing it and fixing any bugs that appear, until the “hardened” phase is reached. After that, the platform is in a more stable phase, and, while there will still be fixes released for it, the main focus is switched to future platforms.

According to Wood, the Symbian Foundation is typically working on five platforms at the same time:

- One release - Symbian^N say (abbreviated to “S^N”) will be in the hardening phase
- Two previous releases will be in the stable phase
- The next release (S^ N+1) will be in feature submission phase
- The one after that (S^ N+2) will be in early builds.

He also says that the features that Symbian^2 should include have already been settled, while the content for Symbian^3 has been chosen, yet some changes are expected to appear there. At the same time, the features that will be included into Symbian^4 and future platforms haven't been established yet.