I met some lovely people at the Traveling Geeks party at a London venue Sunday night. I was looking forward to speaking with this Silicon Valley group that I had heard about. Admittedly I had an agenda which was to make sure that they knew what Symbian Foundation was and why it mattered, other than to provide black t-shirts with ducks on them at the event.
JD & me
When I met Geek JD Lasica we chatted for a few minutes before I mentioned how Symbian had recently changed by going open source etc; I was inspired to mention this by the fact that he described us as ‘Symbian Ltd a software licensing company’ in a blog post. I was surprised at how one of the Geeks could get this wrong but of course it turns out it’s our own fault – JD looked up Symbian in Wikipedia and copied a description of the old Symbian without a link to the new. What’s worse, when you look up ‘Symbian OS’ it doesn’t link it to Symbian Foundation and if you look up ‘Symbian Foundation’ you find an advertisement, no doubt posted last year on June 24th by a marketer when founding members first announced it.
So friends, here’s a quick explanation of the relevant past & new brands:
- The brand – it’s ‘Symbian’ when describing the foundation, the platform in general, applications and devices e.g. I work for Symbian, this is a Symbian application or device, etc. We only use Symbian Foundation for official stuff such as legal docs and reception voicemail.
- When speaking of a specific release – we say Symbian ^2, (the name is mostly important for developers and is pronounced Symbian 2). We’ve just released the first PDK (Product Development Kit) for Symbian ^2 which generally includes the following technologies:
- Symbian OS – the world’s leading mobile operating for smartphones, contributed to Symbian and owned by Nokia
- S60 (the brand will soon cease to exist & FYI S60.com has closed), also contributed and owned by Nokia
- parts of NTT DOCOMO’s platform technologies, contributed and owned by NTT DOCOMO
- parts of Sony Ericsson’s platform technologies, contributed and owned by Sony Ericsson
- To help development of phones and applications, Symbian will release two platform versions per year but technologies will be added intermittently. Each version will include new contributions from the community. Alten is the first company that is not a founding member to contribute and there are more in the pipeline
- The next release, Symbian ^3, will be in the autumn
Other facts:
- Symbian OS trademarks are owned by Nokia, you won’t see Nokia referring to the brand except in previous device specs
- The first compatible Symbian devices are Nokia 97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530, Samsung i8910HD and the Sony Ericsson Satio
To help disambiguate the old and new Symbian brand, I offer an old as well as a new Symbian t-shirt for he or she who re-writes the entries for all things Symbian in Wikipedia! Is there anybody out there?
In the meantime, here are a few minutes with JD on exciting times in technology, Symbian and open source, taken on my Samsung i8910HD.
20 Comments
Long live SYMBIAN
Can I get a DUCK T-Shirt please
After reading this post I went strait to wiki see if I could get me old+new symbian t-shirts to frame and hang on my office wall i love symbian and love my N97 even with its release bugs the phone dose me nicely ty Nokia. Anyhow after going to wiki and searching symbian internaly I think you will find there are multiple searches found including symbian foundation.
This should clarify things a bit.
By the way that that video had excellent image quality but horrible audio quality.
Thanks Nat for a good clarificaiton. One correction, though:
“Symbian OS trademarks are owned by Nokia, you won’t see Nokia referring to the brand except in previous device specs “.
The Symbian OS and other Symbian related trademarks, domain names etc. have been transferred by Nokia to the Symbian Foundation, so the owner of the Symbian OS trademark is Symbian Foundation.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that Nokia will not be referring to the brand. Nokia is making Symbian devices – lots of them – so surely Nokia is referring to the Symbian brand. Nokia is also an active member of the Symbian community, and refers to the brand in that context.
Perhaps you meant to say that Nokia is not referring to S60 brand in the future. This is indeed the case. S60 as a brand is replaced by Symbian, the brand. However, past devices and software releases carry the name they were given when they were released.
>> The first compatible Symbian devices are Nokia 97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530, Samsung i8910HD and the Sony Ericsson Satio
What does this actually mean? I’ve tried to develop on the i8910HD and I can say that it’s not even S60 compatible – many of the APIs which work on Nokia phones are either committed or work in diffident ways.
I was under the impression that Symbian was to ship a validation test suite before allowing phones to be labled as “Symbian compatible”. If this is the case, can we see the results of the test suite on all mentioned phones?
Also, S60 had a tool for listing S60 phones on the market by release/capability. Will Symbian be providing such a tool now?
Check that out and provide feedback/contribution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
Help is on the way! I’ve already started work on some of the articles over on Wikipedia – feel free to correct those, without adding too much bias of course.
I’m in the process of changing the old Symbian OS and Symbian Ltd. articles over to the past-tense now (reflecting the fact that those entities/products don’t exist independently any more), and trying to figure out the best way to salvage the new Symbian and Symbian Foundation articles, but I can’t do it all alone…
so Nokia 97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530, Samsung i8910HD and Sony Ericsson Satio will be able to update to Symbian^2?
hey
i own 5800 and i was wondering if symbian 2 will be relested to it. will it be released like update or will i have to buy a new phone
All those phones are touch phones.
Is this accurate in implying that Symbian^2 is touchscreen only?
In which case, what is the future of keyed smartphones?
(And why do I suddenly have a sinking feeling that I know what it is…?)
I don’t see any posts clarifying the compatibility question of the devices that Anatolie mentions, so I’ll give it a try. I work for Nokia so I can only comment on the Nokia phones mentioned. These Nokia phones are built by using the S60 5.0 release with is designed for touch. As many of these devices are already on the market, and as the foundation got their code and development tools just a couple of months ago, it’s clear that these phones were not built from scratch using only Symbian Foundation provided tools or platform. 5800 Xpress was in the shops already last year.
The Symbian ^1 is based on the initial contribution code, contribution made by Nokia, SonyEricsson and NTT Docomo. Largely the Symbian ^1 equals S60 5.0, and even the SDK that Symbian provides for Symbian ^1 is the Nokia S60 5.0 SDK. SDK can be downloaded on the Symbian developer website, where it says that “until the Symbian Foundation creates its own SDK, the S60 5th Edition SDK from Nokia is being used as the SDK for Symbian^1.”
So, Nokia S60 5.0 devices can be called Symbian ^1 devices because the platform is largely the same. Weather the correct wording is “compatible” or “compliant” or “implementing” or “adhering to” or whatever, I don’t know. Symbian architects or someone in the architecture council could verify this.
Going forward, Nokia will release devices that are built on Symbian platform released from the Symbian Foundation. When claiming full technical and legal compatibility, Nokia will of course be using the right testing tools, certificates and compatibility statements what have you. The Symbian compatibility verification process can probably be found somewhere in here http://developer.symbian.org/main/about/councils/council/architecture_council.php
As for getting updates of new Symbian platform releases to your existing Nokia devices, unfortunately this will not work. Entire platforms cannot be downloaded on a device that has been built using a previous platform version. However, Nokia is offering software updates – increasingly so – on specific features, and now even a whole Java execution environment. I covered this in my personal (i.e. not official Nokia) blog a while back. You can find all the links there http://blog.petras.mobi/2009/07/02/download-your-own-java.aspx Also please read in developer.symbian.org on how the foundation provides bug fixes.
I hope this helped a bit.
PS. Symbian does not equal touch only, also non-touch is supported.
Why is there moderation now on the Symbian blog? this means no discussion during non-office hours?
Hi Petra,
Many thanks for your detailed and helpful answer!
I don’t think we’ve changed the moderation settings (though it’s possible that WordPress have tweaked them behind the scenes). By default, the first comment that someone makes is held for moderator review. After their first posting has been approved, their comments are normally assumed to be non-spam and on topic, and bypass moderation.
However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. One exception is for posts that contain two or more hyperlinks – the rationale being that spam posts often contain a lot of links. That must be why your comment on compatibility was, exceptionally, automatically flagged for moderator attention. Sorry!
// David W.
This is all exciting but I guess what frightens some is that “will my S60 3rd still get any future software from developers and Nokia itself?” Since everyone seems to be moving on. I don’t know the technical aspects of all of this but am just asking as a common consumer. I hate to get a N86 now and have no new apps to add to it next year.
I think Nokia (Symbian if you like) had better get a move on positioning themselves in the marketplace. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Nokia TV Ad (but I see iPhone and Blackberry apps daily)Recent InfoWorld article showed 2nd quarter profits down 66%. Most people in the U.S. haven’t even heard of Nokia lately (let alone Symbian, forget about the caret, it will do nothing but complicate things if people don’t know what it means). I have been a Nokia owner for about 12 years (4 phones), but with the Buzz of Blackberry, Pre, iPhone 3GS, etc… the Nokia/Symbian brand is poised to be lost in the background for those who aren’t techies and understand the Nokia/Symbian benefits. One suggestion would be to get Phone manufacturers, Symbian, and AT&T/T-mobile to start a “Symbian Inside” campain much like the “Intel Inside” campain that got people thinking about why they would want an Intel Processor over an AMD. Maybe even tie it in with a movie placement showing the Symbian phone doing GPS, multi-tasking, being dropped and still working, etc… to show the public what it can do and why they would want it over other brands. I know the U.S. isn’t the World, but the U.S. drives a lot of what the world “wants” and I would hate to see Nokia/Symbian et al fade due to lack of exposure.
HTC gives their phones updates just like Apple does. Why couldn’t Nokia or Symbian do the same? meh, I have no idea why I keep buying Nokias knowing I’d have to buy another to get new features of an improved OS. Nokia did it right with N800 and N810 with the Maemo OS. N800 got the same diablo OS, why couldn’t let say N97 receive the Symbian^2 OS. It would drive more sales to Nokia.
[quote]
As for getting updates of new Symbian platform releases to your existing Nokia devices, unfortunately this will not work. Entire platforms cannot be downloaded on a device that has been built using a previous platform version.
[/quote]
[quote]
Other facts:
* Symbian OS trademarks are owned by Nokia, you won’t see Nokia referring to the brand except in previous device specs
* The first compatible Symbian devices are Nokia 97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530, Samsung i8910HD and the Sony Ericsson Satio
[/quote]
disambiguating the ambiguation in these quotes . . . .
The first says new symbian cannot be downloaded on an platform with previous version,
but the original article states ‘platforms with previous versions’ as being compatible.
Can someone please clarify for me, will the above phones (I have a 5800XM) be updateable to Symbian^2 or not…?
Hi David,
It’s a good question. The answer is that there are two kinds of API (Application Programming Interface).
*) public APIs are preserved between different releases of the platform. So an application that uses only the public APIs and runs on an S^1 device should also be able to run on an S^2 device.
*) platform APIs are in some cases not preserved between different releases of the platform. Components that are designed to be built into the software that ships in a devices, in general use platform APIs as well as public APIs.
Any rule that platform APIs must always be preserved, between different platform releases, would place too large a programming burden on the system developers.
Articles on the developer website explain this in more detail. This article is a good starting point.
This is really a decision for the manufacturers, not for Symbian.
// David W.
[quote]The first compatible Symbian devices are Nokia 97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530, Samsung i8910HD and the Sony Ericsson Satio[/quote]
This is very misleading. You are making it sound like these devices will be updated in the future to newer builds when they will not. Read Petra’s post for clarification. Tose devices mentioned will NOT be updated to newer versions of Symbian. We are screwed basically. Buy a new device, give them more of your money
.
[quote]HTC gives their phones updates just like Apple does.[/quote]
Are you seriously comparing HTC and Apple to Symbian? They all have to do with phones — the comparison stops there. HTC and Apple are organized. They have concrete versioning systems that don’t get changed (S60v5 to Symbian^1? Can you be any MORE confusing? Keep things one way and make it stay that way, for god’s sake!)
Also — most likely, software on one HTC WM phone, will work on any HTC WM phone..
Just like software made for a Windows mobile HTC phone will work on a Samsung windows mobile phone, or a LG windows mobile phone. There’s compatibility all across the board. In fact, you can even install the newest builds of windows mobile 6.5 on HTC\LG devices that were released with windows mobile 5.0 (3-4 years ago).
You want to do that with Symbian? You want upgrades and cross compatibility? Haha! Software for Nokia symbians60v5 doesn’t even run on Samsung \ SE phones with the same exact operating system. There’s proprietary APIs and broken code all over the place. We will get no updates. There’s no organization, that’s how they choose to do things.
Lesson Learned: Don’t buy any more Symbian phones until (if?) they get their act together. Consumers want devices to last them longer than 6 months. We want upgrades and cross compatibility between different manufacturers.
What would people do if they had a Dell laptop running XP and an Acer laptop running the same OS, yet some software only worked on the Dell one? That’s competely rediculous — but that’s how it is with Symbian. It’s 2009, not 1992. Get your act together (sorry for being harsh but — someone has to say it).
[quote]Any rule that platform APIs must always be preserved, between different platform releases, would place too large a programming burden on the system developers.[/quote]
How does windows mobile accomplish compatibility like this then?
You can pretty much (99% of the time) run software made for previous versions of windows mobile phones (lets say the HTC apache, ppc 6700 for example from 2005, natively comes with WM5) on WM phones (lets say the samsung i8000) that were released recently, with a completely different version?
They’re organized, that’s how
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