14 DAY TRIAL // The Symbian Foundation unveiled today, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the Symbian^3 (S^3) platform, which comes as the first entirely open source release of the operating system, following the transition to an open source license for the platform, announced at the beginning of the month. According to the Foundation, the new platform version is expected to become “feature complete” by the end of Q1, and to include a great deal of enhancements when compared to the previously launched flavors.
Among the improvements that S^3 should land on the market with, the Foundation counts the following “significant usability and interface advances, faster networking, acceleration for 2D and 3D graphics in games and applications, HDMI support (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), music store integration, an improved user interface with easier navigation and multi-touch gesture support, a feature-rich homescreen, and the ability to run even more applications simultaneously.”
At the same time, the Foundation reported that the Symbian community members, such as handset makers, wireless carriers, or technology providers, professional services companies, along with application developers, had already engaged with Symbian^3. Following the move, the first mobile phones running under the new platform version are expected to arrive on the market sometime in the third quarter of the ongoing year.
Among the major advances that S^3 is set to introduce, we can count HDMI support, so that users can watch high-definition movie at 1080p quality on TVs, integration with music store within the radio, which enables the fast identification of tracks, better memory management, a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture for a faster and more responsive user interface, the adoption of a direct “single tap” interaction model and multi-touch support, industry-leading networking architecture, with support for 4G networks, one-click connectivity for all applications, and support for multiple pages of widgets on the homescreen.
Lee M. Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said, “S^3 is another huge milestone in the evolution of our platform. Now that it is fully open source, the door is open to individual contributors, device creators and third-party developer companies, as well as other organizations, to create more compelling products and services than ever before. We have enjoyed significant momentum since we completed S^2, with companies including Sun, Nokia, Ixonos, Comarch and Accenture, among others, contributing to S^3. We are now looking to build on this momentum and remain on course to complete S^4 later this year.”
According to the Symbian Foundation, the experience that developers will receive from the new S^3 platform has been improved too. The Qt toolkit comes pre-integrated into all kits, while the runtime in S^3 features support for all devices back to S60 3.1. Moreover, Web Runtime support is one of the main parts of the developing process, so that developers can use their knowledge in HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX for the building of Homescreen widgets or applications.