We Explore the Symbian OS

February 2010

One of the options available for mobile devices is the Symbian Operating System (OS). It was originally developed by Symbian Ltd., was based on Psion's EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors. In 2008 Symbian Software Limited was acquired by Nokia® and a new independent nonprofit organization called the Symbian Foundation was established. The Symbian OS and its associated user interfaces were contributed to the foundation with the objective of making the Symbian platform royalty-free, open-source software. The resulting Symbian platform has been designated as the successor to Symbian OS, following the official launch of the Symbian Foundation in April 2009.

As of November 2008, Symbian was the most prevalent OS in the smart mobile market. Its market share was 46.6% of smart mobile devices, the Apple® iPhone™ was 17.3%, BlackBerry® was 15.3% and Microsoft® Windows Mobile® was 13.5%. The Palm® Prē™ and Android™ devices, both of which were released after this date, likely changed these figures and Apple has continued to gain market share.

At present, there are a large number of smart phones using Symbian. Not surprisingly, many Nokia phones use Symbian, but there are also offerings from Sony Ericsson®, Samsung®, Sharp®, Fujitsu®, Mitsubishi® and Motorola®.

In addition to basic cell phone functionality, the Symbian OS supports access to the Internet with web browsing, social networking, video, GPS and many other features. The Symbian Foundation provides what they call a “complete framework,” which is supposed to make the creation of new applications very easy. There are a fair number of applications currently available. In fact, one of my favorite sites to find software, PalmGear, now has a sister site called Symbian Gear (www.symbiangear.com). They have a wide range of applications, the majority of which range in price from a couple of US dollars (USD) to $100 USD. There are a few free applications.

Currently, a search for specific pulmonary, critical care or sleep applications finds nothing at all. It is hard to know if this is a problem as some of my most-used applications have a web version, which can be accessed using the Symbian web browser. Unfortunately, some of these smart devices have a fairly low screen resolution so the browsing experience may leave something to be desired. It is possible that some websites will direct users of these devices to pages formatted for smaller screens. I would be very interested to hear what experiences readers of this column may have had.

The Symbian Foundation has some very ambitious plans for the future. The foundation's site, www.symbian.org, shows a lot of plans for future applications. Unfortunately, the site does not operate correctly so the present and future pages seem to look the same with no great detail available. I hope this will get cleaned up sometime soon. As this operating system runs on many less-expensive mobile devices, I expect it will remain a major player for some time to come.

The opinions rendered herein are those of the author; no representation, warranty of guarantee of fitness is either made or implied.