14 DAY TRIAL // The Symbian Foundation is hard at work with finalizing the latest version of the Symbian operating system, which was announced officially a couple of months ago, namely Synbian^3. The development of the platform has reached the point in which Symbian^3 has been announced as being functionally complete.
Mark Skrebels, senior release manager at the Symbian Foundation and chairman of the Release Council, announced the move via Twitter. This is a very important milestone in the development of the platform, especially since it's the first time the Symbian Foundation achieves it with a fully open source release. Moreover, this also means that the platform is ready for community 'use'.
Mobile phone makers and application developers are those who should benefit the most from this achievement. End-users are not impacted by this, except maybe for the fact that they can rest assured that the first Symbian^3 devices are on track to being released on the market in the second half of the ongoing year, just as promised before.
What being functionally complete means for Synbian^3 includes the fact that the platform can now be used by the community, in an attempt to harden it. This includes the development of handsets based on it, the building of software solutions, as well as the analysis of its features and capabilities. Features are still being added into the mix at this point, until the platform is considered ready for release on the market.
From now on, the Symbian^3 development will move towards improving the stability of the OS, fixing bugs and the like. An early SDK for Symbian^3 should arrive in June, followed by a beta version in about two months, and by the full release in October, a recent article on All About Symbian reads. Most of these plans have been previously announced by the Symbian Foundation. More details on them are available in the Symbian Foundation release plan document (PDF link).