What is it?
Symbian OS is a proprietary operating system for mobile
devices.
Smartphones remain a niche product in the mobile market, but
the opportunities for growth are massive. Last year 64 million were
shipped worldwide, contributing to overall mobile phone sales of
986 million. Mobile analyst
Canalys said smartphone sales
were up 63% on 2005.
Symbian is favoured by phone maker
Nokia, in particular, and the operating system has about 72% of
the market, according to Canalys. However, it is under pressure
from growing use of
Linux (about 20% of the market), and Microsoft's
Windows Mobile.
The roads to developing applications for Symbian lead from
mainstream programming skills. The dominant language is C++,
followed by Java, with room for Visual Basic, C#, Ruby, Python and
others.
Where did it originate?
Symbian originated with Psion's
Epoc operating
system. Symbian Ltd was formed as a partnership between Psion,
Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola in 1998.
Psion sold out in 2004, and the major shareholders are now Nokia
with 48%, Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens. The company's
headquarters remain in London and Cambridge, with offices in the US
and Asia.
What's it for?
Symbian OS is designed to make the most of the limited capacity
- screen, keyboard, memory and storage - of handheld mobile
devices. It has its own libraries, user interface frameworks and
toolkits. The dominant integrated development environments (IDEs)
are the Eclipse-based Carbide family from Nokia, but there are also
plug-ins for Visual Studio, and the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit is
used for Java ME.
There is a
free version of the Nokia IDE, Carbide.c++ Express, for
"non-commercial" development, which would be a good introduction to
the subset of C++, which developers accustomed to C++ on less
limited platforms will have to get to grips with.
Where is it used?
Networks supporting Symbian include Vodafone, Orange, NTT
DoCoMo, T-Mobile, Telefonica Móviles España and Telecom Italia.
What systems does it run on?
C++ is supplier-independent, and is supported by both the
Eclipse development platform and by Microsoft's C++/CLI.
What makes it special?
There is huge potential for application development if users
wake up to it. At least 7,478 third-party Symbian applications are
commercially available, but only half of Symbian smartphone users
have downloaded and installed one or more of them, according to
consultancy firm Yankee Group.
How difficult is it to master?
Developers with a background in Eclipse will be familiar with
the Carbide.c++ approach, although the tool is structured to guide
any developer though the steps required to write and deploy Symbian
applications. Symbian also publishes downloadable reference
applications and utilities written by its own engineers in C++ or
Java, with full source code.
What's coming up?
The next version of C++, known as C++0x, is under
development.
More on Symbian
OS >>
Five years of Symbian versus Microsoft >>
Symbian: the 'European' operating system >>
Mobile apps will boost productivity >>
Windows Mobile tries to capture market with apps >>
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