Symbian

Not to be confused with Sybian or Symbion.
This article is about the operating system. For other uses, see Symbian (disambiguation).

Symbian
Home screen of Nokia Belle Feature Pack 2 in Romanian (last version of Symbian)
DeveloperSymbian Ltd. (1998–2008)
Symbian Foundation (2008–11)
Nokia (2010–11)
Accenture on behalf of Nokia (2011–13)[1]
Written inC++[2]
OS familyEPOC (Symbian)
Working stateNo longer supported
Source modelProprietary software,[3] formerly Free software (2010–11)
Initial release5 June 1997; 27 years ago (1997-06-05) (as EPOC32)
Final releaseNokia Belle Feature Pack 2 / 2 October 2012; 12 years ago (2012-10-02)
Marketing targetSmartphones
Available in48 languages
List of languages
Arabic (Arabic, Urdu), Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK, US), Estonian, Finnish, French (France, Canada), Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indian (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi), Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal, Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish (Spain, Latin America), Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
Update methodSymbian Signed certificates
Package manager.sis, .sisx, .jad, .jar
PlatformsARM, x86[4]
Kernel typeReal-time microkernel, EKA2
Default
user interface		S60 (from 2009)
LicenseProprietary software,[5] formerly Eclipse Public
Official websitesymbian.nokia.com (defunct as of May 2014), symbian.org (defunct as of 2009–10)
Support status
Unsupported
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Symbian was a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones.[6] It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium.[7] Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, at a time when smartphones were in limited use, when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably less popular in North America.

The Symbian OS platform is formed of two components: one being the microkernel-based operating system with its associated libraries, and the other being the user interface (as middleware), which provides the graphical shell atop the OS.[8] The most prominent user interface was the S60 (formerly Series 60) platform built by Nokia, first released in 2002 and powering most Nokia Symbian devices. UIQ was a competing user interface mostly used by Motorola and Sony Ericsson that focused on pen-based devices, rather than a traditional keyboard interface from S60. Another interface was the MOAP(S) platform from carrier NTT DoCoMo in the Japanese market.[9][10] Applications for these different interfaces were not compatible with each other, despite each being built atop Symbian OS. Nokia became the largest shareholder of Symbian Ltd. in 2004 and purchased the entire company in 2008.[11] The non-profit Symbian Foundation was then created to make a royalty-free successor to Symbian OS. Seeking to unify the platform, S60 became the Foundation's favoured interface and UIQ stopped development. The touchscreen-focused Symbian^1 (or S60 5th Edition) was created as a result in 2009. Symbian^2 (based on MOAP) was used by NTT DoCoMo, one of the members of the Foundation, for the Japanese market. Symbian^3 was released in 2010 as the successor to S60 5th Edition, by which time it became fully free software. The transition from a proprietary operating system to a free software project is believed to be one of the largest in history.[12] Symbian^3 received the Anna and Belle updates in 2011.[13][14]

The Symbian Foundation disintegrated in late 2010 and Nokia took back control of the OS development.[15][16] In February 2011, Nokia, by then the only remaining company still supporting Symbian outside Japan, announced that it would use Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform, while Symbian would be gradually wound down.[17][18] Two months later, Nokia moved the OS to proprietary licensing, only collaborating with the Japanese OEMs[19] and later outsourced Symbian development to Accenture.[6][20] Although support was promised until 2016, including two major planned updates, by 2012 Nokia had mostly abandoned development and most Symbian developers had already left Accenture,[21] and in January 2014 Nokia stopped accepting new or changed Symbian software from developers.[22] The Nokia 808 PureView in 2012 was officially the last Symbian smartphone from Nokia.[23] NTT DoCoMo continued releasing OPP(S) (Operator Pack Symbian, successor of MOAP) devices in Japan, which still act as middleware on top of Symbian.[24] Phones running this include the F-07F [ja] from Fujitsu and SH-07F [ja] from Sharp in 2014.

  1. ^ "Nokia and Accenture Finalize Symbian Software Development and Support Services Outsourcing Agreement | Accenture Newsroom". newsroom.accenture.com.
  2. ^ Lextrait, Vincent (January 2010). "The Programming Languages Beacon, v10.0". Archived from the original on 30 May 2012. Retrieved 5 January 2010.
  3. ^ Nokia transitions Symbian source to non-open license. Ars Technica. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  4. ^ Lee Williams "Symbian on Intel's Atom architecture". Archived from the original on 19 April 2009. Retrieved 31 March 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link). blog.symbian.org. 16 April 2009
  5. ^ "Not Open Source, just Open for Business". symbian.nokia.com. 4 April 2011. Retrieved 23 August 2014.[dead link‍]
  6. ^ a b Lunden, Ingrid (30 September 2011). "Symbian Now Officially No Longer Under The Wing of Nokia, 2,300 Jobs Go". moconews.net. Archived from the original on 1 October 2011. Retrieved 30 September 2011.
  7. ^ "infoSync Interviews Nokia Nseries Executive". Infosyncworld.com. 24 June 2010. Archived from the original on 13 July 2011. Retrieved 12 August 2010.
  8. ^ Palmberg, Christopher (2006). Next generation mobile telecommunications networks: Challenges to the Nordic ICT industries. Emerald Group. ISBN 9781846630668.
  9. ^ "UI wars 'tore Symbian apart' – Nokia". The Register.
  10. ^ "UIQ staff put on notice". The Register.
  11. ^ "DailyTech - Nokia Offers to Purchase All Symbian Shares for $410M". Archived from the original on 21 August 2016. Retrieved 22 May 2016.
  12. ^ "Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free". Wired. 3 February 2010.
  13. ^ "Nokia announces Symbian 'Anna' update for N8, E7, C7 and C6-01; first of a series of updates (video)". Engadget. 12 April 2011. Retrieved 3 October 2022.
  14. ^ "Nokia announces Symbian Belle alongside three new devices". Engadget. 24 August 2011. Retrieved 3 October 2022.
  15. ^ "Nokia reabsorbs Symbian software". BBC News. 8 November 2010.
  16. ^ "Symbian is dead. Long live Symbian - VisionMobile". Archived from the original on 23 June 2016. Retrieved 22 May 2016.
  17. ^ "Nokia's new strategy and structure, Symbian to be a "franchise platform", MeeGo still in long term plans - All About MeeGo". www.allaboutmeego.com. Archived from the original on 6 September 2013. Retrieved 4 December 2012.
  18. ^ "RIP: Symbian". Engadget. 11 February 2011. Retrieved 3 October 2022.
  19. ^ "Nokia moves Symbian to closed licensing". 11 April 2011.
  20. ^ Epstein, Zach (23 June 2011). "Symbian is officially no longer Nokia's problem". BGR. Retrieved 3 October 2022.
  21. ^ "C'est la vie - 'Support' expectations for Symbian 'until 2016' unrealistic". All About Symbian. 30 July 2014.
  22. ^ Tung, Liam. "Nokia says final sayonara to Symbian and MeeGo apps as store freezes updates". ZDNet. Retrieved 16 February 2015.
  23. ^ Techcrunch, "Nokia Confirms The PureView Was Officially The Last Symbian Phone", "Techcrunch", 24 January 2013 as by Nokia on 24 January 2013 – Nokia Corporation Q4 and full year 2012 Interim Report: "The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia"
  24. ^ "NTT DoCoMo akan gunakan TIZEN sebagai pengganti OPP?". 15 November 2013.