Symbian Successfully Ported to Intel's Atom

The Symbian operating system, mainly designed for running on handhelds and mobile phones, has recently been ported to an Intel Atom-based motherboard, consequently confirming the compatibility of the platform with the increasingly successful Atom processor. This new feature of the Symbian OS will provide system vendors with an alternative choice for building Atom-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) or even netbooks that can run on this mobile-focused operating system.

Symbian, a platform that has been mainly developed for mobile environment and ARM-based devices, has been acquired in 2008 by Nokia, the leader in the mobile industry. The company openly expressed its plans to distribute the code base of the Symbian platform and release it under an open license, a process that would be facilitated by the Symbian Foundation, established by Nokia.

According to a recent blog post by Lee Williams, the head of Nokia's S60 unit, the mobile platform has been successfully ported to an Atom-powered computer system, confirming the new compatibility feature of the S60 operating system with Intel's highly successful Atom processor.

“A few of the bright and capable guys in the SOSCO (S60 on Symbian Customer Operations) team have Symbian compiling via GCC and now running on an off the shelf Atom based motherboard from Intel,” said Lee Williams in the blog entry. “It would be most interesting to see what level of interest we can generate in this port, especially if that includes some major business partners willing to come in and invest in the development of a product solution, and one that enables some differentiators to come to market for consumers.”

The experiment of the Symbian OS being ported on a system that is powered by an x86 Atom processor is an interesting and somewhat anticipated evolution of the platform. However, it's not clear if some of the upcoming Atom-based devices will be running on the operating system.