14 DAY TRIAL // Symbian is changing. This is an assertion generally true for most of the mobile operating systems available on the market at the moment, yet, when it comes to Symbian, things seem to be a little confusing, as the changes haven't been detailed properly yet. However, the Symbian Foundation already announced plans to move the platform into open source, future releases of the operating system have already been unveiled, as part of its roadmap, including the Symbian^3 or Symbian^4, and the same happened recently with the plans it has for the platform's UI.
While UI changes usually attract the attention of end-users, it seems that there will also be a series of changes that future flavors of the platform will come with and which will mostly interest developers. David Wood, who is part of the Leadership Team of the Symbian Foundation, stated in a recent interview with TamsS60, “From Symbian^4, Qt will become the preferred programming environment for many parts of S60 app development. Qt is widely regarded as a productive, elegant set of class libraries, with a great deal of active community support.”
Basically, he says, this means that “the current “S60 Avkon” APIs for the UIs of applications will be phased out,” though public APIs will continue to see support from the Foundation. It seems that applications developed for S60 will continue to work on Symbian^3, yet compatibility issues will rise due to the new set of UI elements (Orbit) that will be included in future releases. “Qt itself can coexist fine with existing Avkon and S60,” Wood stated, also adding that most Symbian platform APIs would be accessible even when Qt and Orbit were present.
Basically, Symbian^4 will mark an important change in the platform's evolution, resulting both in a different UI and a different development environment. The Foundation makes this step in an attempt to improve application development for the platform, it seems. Those who will be affected the most by these changes are the developers, yet the Foundation is set to offer all the necessary support for them. One such step has already been made through the release of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing platform.
While devices based on S^1, S^2, and S^3 are expected to still be available for a long time from now on, developers are about to learn what changes S^4 will bring to them. And Wood also explained, in a comment to the interview, “The difficult question is: why not support Avkon alongside Orbit? That’s a decision for the Symbian community as a whole to take. It’s conceivable that some manufacturers might ship devices like this, but it looks more likely (from reading the discussions on the Symbian Developer Forums) that complete removal of Avkon will allow a more efficient software system that will also pose less confusion to end-users.”