Telephony has been part of the core functionality of all Symbian devices to date, it’s also one of the most closely guarded secrets out there. So now that’s Symbian’s open – what does that mean for telephony?
The answer is, we’ve just taken a giant leap forward. With the opening of the Symbian platform you now, of course, get access to a all the source code for the system including the telephony subsystem. Not only that, but you also get access to the hardware adaptation code that the Symbian community uses. Right now we have two different adaptations:
- One is a high level adaptation based on the AT command protocol which you can use with an “off the shelf” modem (check out the Wild Ducks project of an example of a group using this);
- The other is the entire adaptation code for Nokia’s internally developed modem.
That’s a big deal – this is stuff that has in the past been kept closely under wraps and even within companies like Nokia you had to have a good reason to get access to it. It also means that Symbian now has the most complete, open source telephony stack with:
- Open source hardware adaptation code for in-production devices
- Open source code for the phone applications and services
- Open APIs for developers to create their own applications that use the telephony stack.
The next step for us is to standardise some of these hardware interfaces to make it easier to switch between different configurations and make it cheaper to develop for a new modem. Watch this space for a follow up article on how we’re going about that and the successes we’ve had in the SHAI project.
This is potentially massive, good to point it out! One of the big pain points historically was getting a working telephony stack. I hope Symbian are planning more in this series pointing out some of the unique advantages of this project.
I have my fingers crossed for the wild ducks project, showing how a small team working in their spare time can make a working S^3 phone. Hopefully it will show how you can make something with little effort and encourage small projects for different devices to spring up all over.
If you use off the shelf hardware you can’t hope to compete on price with the big boys, but you can very well compete on device development speed – especially when you have a complete base port and OS/Middleware/Applications stack available. It gives you a complete working system and the tools to hit your differentiating points as simply as possible. Exciting times
Sure, it might not be possible to make (emulated on top of a packet-switched network?) circuit-switched voice/data or video calls, but I assume that there shouldn’t be any reason why we can’t use an off-the-shelf HSDPA modem or mobile phone in USB CDC mode to provide rudimentary SMS and data connectivity to a “homemade” device using our AT command-based modem abstraction layer?
@Tyson Key – absolutely – that’s the aim of the Wild Ducks project I referenced, currently we’ve got the PDK 3.0.e emulator making and receiving phone calls using an off-the-shelf modem.
If you’re ever near the Symbian offices let us know and you can come and take a look (maybe even help us out if you’ve got the time)
@tajpritchard – Good stuff! I have a feeling that some of the OpenBSC, OpenBTS, AirProbe and Kannel stuff might be of interest eventually, for those wanting to work with things at the GSM level, for what it’s worth.
Not quite sure if the code and hardware that we have will allow for raw access to GSM-layer traffic, but it’s an avenue for enthusiasts to explore.
Thanks for the offer, regarding visiting and helping. I visited near the end of July last year (thanks to everyone involved!), although I got the feeling that things were just getting started, and that there wasn’t really much to showcase yet. I’m not sure when I’ll next be able to visit London again, though.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sloan Bowman, ian kennedy, Anirudh Sharma, Anirudh Sharma, Chris Aniszczyk (zx) and others. Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said: RT @symbian: Open #Symbian – Open Telephony? http://ow.ly/15s88 [...]
The implications of open telephony go well beyond having access to the sample source code for modifications.
A common myth in the industry is that with so many open source platforms we have unlocked the complete potential of the developer. The truth is that most open source platforms are open only in bits and parts with the most important parts still not under open licenses.
You can now really put together a device without having to depend on a 3rd party who guards that code and the knowledge with their lawyers’ long sword
. Anyone with access to off the shelf hardware can put together a device. Let the innovation begin!