The Symbian Foundation has demonstrated a prototype Netbook
running its Symbian S60 mobile operating system.
According to
Lee Williams in a blog posting on Symbian blog, a team from the
SOSCO (S60 on Symbian Customer Operations) has ported Symbian onto
an off-the-shelf Atom-based motherboard from Intel.
"It would be most interesting to see what level of interest we
can generate in this port, especially if that includes some major
business partners willing to come in and invest in the development
of a product, and one that enables some differentiators to come to
market for consumers."
Symbian said it hoped the project would not attempt to replicate
the PC Netbook model. "Instead it should really showcase the power
of our code base, and an ecosystem of highly skilled providers of
mobile technology."
Although technically possible to run Netbooks with the Symbian
OS, a commentator on the blog, noted, "Making an OS port to another
hardware [platform] is a relatively simple task. The difficult part
comes after that. None of the upper layers was designed to be
portable. There are huge amounts of work needed to simply make the
user interface scale to bigger screens. Almost all of the
applications would need a rewrite. And after that, let's be honest,
nobody would want to use S60 applications on a non-phone
device."