Symbian Receives €22M Funding, SYMBEOSE Supports It

The Symbian Foundation has just announced that, under an initiative from the European Commission (EC), a total investment of over €22 million was received for the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform.

According to the Foundation, it will lead the new development project, which is part of a consortium of major European technology organizations that includes 24 entities from 8 European countries.

Among these organizations, the company lists mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, mobile network operators, application developers, and more.

The consortium is called SYMBEOSE, which means “Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe,” and is aimed at finding opportunities for Symbian’s global stakeholders via various development projects.

According to the Foundation, the proposed advancements to the Symbian platform are mainly focused on improving the “basis for new device creation on Symbian.” Moreover, the consortium will explore new ways in which mobile services with relevance for the future can be supported.

“For example, the SYMBEOSE initiative will develop new core platform capabilities, providing the best possible levels of power efficiency and improving Symbian’s current, market-leading offering in this area,” the Foundation announced.

“This will be achieved by delivering fresh optimizations which harness the rapidly developing area of multi-core processing used in conjunction with new techniques in Asymmetrical Multiprocessing.”

The development process will also focus on “cloud-computing,” which should be supported on new devices.

“Core system capabilities within mobile platforms in general need to be better understood in terms of improving platform efficiency and the performance of cloud-based services,” the Foundation stated.

Another development area would be that of mobile platforms and embedded devices, where new opportunities can emerge.

The SYMBEOSE initiative will also focus on open source code development, with the Symbian community being able to monitor the progress the consortium will make, and contribute where necessary.