14 DAY TRIAL // The Symbian Foundation announced only a few weeks ago that it had managed to move the Symbian operating system into open source completely, and also unveiled during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the Symbian^3 flavor of the OS, the first open source version, expected to arrive on handsets on the market in Q3 2010. The next step is Symbian^4, which is expected to be released before the end of the year, with the first devices set to be launched in 2011, and which can be now see in the two videos below.
As stated a few times before, the Symbian^4 operating system should mark a great step on the evolution of the operating system towards a more appealing solution, yet the videos that surfaced over at fiercewireless do not impress as much as expected. What can be seen here are details related mainly to the user interface of the upcoming Symbian^4, including its touch friendliness or the possibility to set up home screens customized with widgets and live information, but that it not all in the end.
The operating system was supposed to be revolutionary, and while the user interface might not be as impressive as suggested before, there are chances that all the modifications it packs under the hood will make it more appealing. S^4 is set to arrive as a complete redesign of the platform, boasting both a new UI and a different development environment, based on Nokia's Qt. The same as with the new Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft, developers will have to rebuild their apps for S^4 but, while the former impressed a lot last week with the new approach Microsoft presented, the latter does not manage to do the same based on the videos below.
However, one should agree that we cannot characterize the Symbian^4 platform based only on two short videos as the ones here. The OS still has a long road ahead before arriving on the market and, although it might look a lot like the Android or iPhone clients, it will certainly be different when released in final form. Not to mention that there should also be a series of under the hood enhancements included in the package, which are not seen in these clips.