14 DAY TRIAL // The Symbian operating system is set to come to the market with a great deal of new features in 2010, the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia announced at its Nokia Capital Markets Day earlier this week. While we already had the chance to take a look at what the future Symbian UI might look like, it seems that the operating system will come with far more goodies than we might expect.
The currently available version of Symbian might not be too appealing to users, especially since it is considered to sport a rather old interface, yet it seems that the second quarter of the next year might bring along some wanted new features, which should arrive with the first devices running under Symbian^3. Among them, one might have learned already that we're to expect support for multi-touch and capacitive touchscreen displays, as well as a reduced clutter, and a smaller number of user prompts.
Moreover, the Symbian platform should come with single tap navigation, as well as with 3x faster UI performance, scrolling increased from 15 to 60 fps, not to mention support for multiple home screens. However, this is not all. Symbian^3 will not come around only with UI tweaks, but with some changes in the platform too, some of the features paving the road towards the future Symbian^4 release.
Among the other features that one might expect from Symbian^3, we can count the Qt 4.6 integration, (something the recent release of the cross-platform app has already announced in a way), as well as HDMI output, song recognition and music store integration with radio app, CalDAVsupport, HD video, and integrated NFC. At least, the integration of Qt 4.6 hints at the future Symbian^4 release, yet we'll have to wait for the end of 2010 to near to learn more details on this release of the platform, it seems.
As for the Symbian^3 flavor, it seems that it might not be too long before additional details will emerge. The first device to run under it are expected to reach the market by the end of spring 2010, which means that details should start emerging about three months from now. For what it's worth, considering the fact that Nokia will deliver only a halved number of handsets to the market next year, we might see some pretty amazing phones from the company.