Symbian Operating System, which is also known as Symbian OS is designed for the mobile phone environment. It addresses constraints of mobile phones by providing a framework to handle low memory situations, a power management model, and a rich software layer implementing industry standards for communications, telephony and data rendering.
Symbian Operating System is designed for the mobile phone environment. It addresses constraints of the mobile phones by providing a framework to handle the low memory situations, a power management model, and a rich software layer implementing industry standards for the communications, telephony and the data rendering. Even with these abundant features, Symbian Operating System puts no constraints on the integration of other peripheral hardware. This flexibility allows the handset manufacturers to pursue innovative and the original designs. Symbian Operating System is proven on several platforms. It started life as the operating system for the Psion series of the consumer PDA products and the various adaptations by Diamond, Oregon Scientific and the Ericsson. The first dedicated mobile phone incorporating Symbian Operating System was the Ericsson R380 Smartphone, which incorporated a flip open keypad to reveal a touch screen display and several connected applications. Most recently available is the Nokia 9210 Communicator, a mobile phone that has a QWERTY keyboard and the color display, and is fully open to the third party applications written in Java or C++. The five key points such as small mobile devices, mass-market, intermittent wireless connectivity, diversity of products and an open platform for the independent software developers which are the premises on which Symbian Operating System was designed and developed. This makes it distinct from any desktop, work station or server operating system. This also makes Symbian Operating System different from the embedded operating systems, or any of its competitors, which weren't designed with all these key points in the mind. Symbian is committed to the open standards. Symbian Operating System has a POSIX compliant interface and a Sun approved JVM, and the company is actively working with the emerging standards, such as the J2ME, Bluetooth, MMS, SyncML, IPv6 and WCDMA. As well as its own developer support organization, books, papers and courses, Symbian delivers a global network of third party competency and training centers, the Symbian Competence Centers and the Symbian Training Centers. These are specifically directed at enabling other organizations and developers to take part in this new economy. Symbian has announced and implemented a strategy that will see Symbian Operating System running on many advanced open mobile phones.