Angus Kidman30 October 2009, 1:33 PM
Symbian's director has taken a series of pot shots at the iPhone, while proclaiming the Symbian mobile OS "three years ahead of its time".
Symbian's executive director has predicted that handsets using the full open source version of the Nokia-backed phone operating system would be in circulation in early 2010.
Speaking in the opening keynote for the Symbian Exchange & Exposition 2009 in London, Symbian Foundation executive director Lee Williams said that the move to make Symbian an open source platform, which commenced last year and saw the organisation take a major revenue hit, was progressing well.
Above: some of the many (mediocre) phones running Symbian S60.
Williams acknowledged that producing road maps for a volunteer-led code base was tricky, but grabbed the opportunity to emphasise the feature set of Symbian compared to its major rivals. The Symbian S3 code release, due for completion in mid-2010, includes 466 new features, he said. Handsets using the open source S2 release would appear in the first half of that year.
"I would be embarrassed to stand up and tell someone that because I could deliver cut and paste in six months time that I had the world's most advanced mobile OS," he commented, in a not-so-subtle swipe at the iPhone, which only added cut and paste when the 3.0 version was released in the middle of 2009. "What we actually have in the Symbian platform is truly the world's most advanced mobile OS."
Apple wasn't mentioned by name in that remark, but did pop up when Williams discussed the future of online application stores, a market dominated by the iPhone's App store. "The world doesn't need yet another app store from a developer standpoint," he said, before going on to ask for one anyway. "What I would love to see is a small four or six person shop that gets a little venture capital money and says 'We're going to build a better app store than Apple can or Microsoft can or that Blackberry has'". Williams said he "would love to see that happen", adding that "it would remove some control points" that annoy developers.
Williams singled out the recently released micro-kernel for Symbian as a key milestone: "We've taken a crown jewel, something two or three years ahead of its time, and made it available in open source ahead of schedule so we can continue this migration to a full OS distribution."
Williams also took a veiled pot shot at the proliferation of Windows Mobile and Android devices. "We're not going the direction of fragmentation like a lot of systems out there, we're going for unification."
Williams stressed that the Symbian project was quite different to other successful open source platforms such as Linux or Eclipse. "A lot of open source initiatives are usually a green fields opportunity, a white canvas where an all- volunteer army builds something from the ground up to fill a specific need. We're doing something very different." To date, 165 companies have signed up as part of the project.
Key features planned for the S3 release include enhanced input capabilities for both touch and keypad input. "We have truly advanced what a user interface does in mobile [in S3]," Williams said. "We're preserving all the strengths of the focus and scroll and select UIs."
Symbian S3 will also include a new set of "social APIs" to enable developers to easily tap into social networking platforms. "In some ways connecting is a limited proposition. We've largely copied the PC experience. We're actively getting contributions that create a social API. This is quite powerful What it means at the API level is you can reach throughout all the other applications that are part of the system and access these API calls. You have full integration, not just a single dedicated application. You can do mashups with widgets and create them quickly and easily.