Symbian Foundation Takes First Step In Open Sourcing Mobile OS 88
readthemall writes to let us know that the Symbian Foundation has released the first of several packages in their plan to open source the entire Symbian mobile OS. "On Wednesday, Symbian made available its first package covered by the EPL, the OS Security Package, according to Symbian developer Craig Heath. 'The OS Security Package source code is now available under the EPL, and it is the very first package to be officially moved from the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL) to... the EPL,' Heath wrote in a blog post. Heath said the EPL would allow the security package to bypass export regulations in the UK, where the Symbian code is legally based."
Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? (Score:2, Informative)
They run pretty well and sync up with software people use fairly easily, such as Outlook, etc. ?
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
You should soon be able to use Qt for Symbian development.
Nokia own both Symbian and Qt, and the Qt labs blog is reporting Qt being ported to S60.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/06/29/port-of-qtwebkit-to-s60/ [trolltech.com]
Note that Qt is an entire cross-platform library, not just for GUI - it includes stuff like threads, network comms, XML even WebKit!
Right (Score:3, Informative)
this step is too little, too late.
Cos several hundred million phones produced by the largest phone manufacturers in the world are all just going to go away. Are you living on Android world?
This is interesting and welcome news.
Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't Qt owned by Nokia, not the symbian foundation?
Do you have a problem reading? From the GP:
Nokia own both Symbian and Qt
Where in his post did he say that Qt was owned by the Symbian foundation?
It doesn't say anything about open sourcing the symbian version of Qt.
The Qt for S60 Technology Preview is available under a special technology preview license, GNU LGPL version 2.1 and GPL version 3.
http://www.qtsoftware.com/developer/technical-preview-qt-for-s60 [qtsoftware.com]
Psion Calendar in SymbianOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Precursor to Symbian the Psion OS had Calendar.app superior over todays calendar apps.
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Informative)
and now that Android has arrived and brought a much more friendly programming environment, this step is too little, too late.
Too bad the figures don't bear you out what with Symbian powering almost 50% of all smart phones while Android is fighting to get more than 2-3% of the market. There are more Symbian-powered phones sold each quarter than there are even total devices running Android.
Re:Symbian vs. Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Well it's sort of irrelevant now. Most phone chipsets have two ARM cores - one for the signalling and one for the application.
And as someone put it if you're developing a phone do you really want to deal with bugs like "when I play this Britney Spears MP3 my phone drops calls" or worse "phone fails radio test at the testhouse, seems to depend which application is running but we can't figure out how".
If you put both the applications and the signalling stack on the same ARM you're pretty much asking for this. I'd much rather have say a small ARM9 core and a beefier ARM11 for the application.
The ARM9 doesn't take up much space and you can give it priority access to external flash/sdram and try to run parts of the radio stack as possible from tightly coupled memory, i.e. on die SRAM. That makes it more or less a different machine and minimizes the chance of application code sabotaging the radio. Plus you can run a tiny OS kernel designed for network stacks on the ARM9 and Linux/WinMo/Android or whatever on the ARM11.
And when the phone is in not running applications but needs to stay connected to the network you can shutdown the power hungry application core and the flash, run the ARM9 at a low clock frequency, put the SDRAM in self refresh and have the network stack do its thing mostly low power TCM and cache.
Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? (Score:3, Informative)
In what way is Symbian a failure? It seems to be on an awful lot more mobiles than WinMo.
Re:Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share (Score:3, Informative)
Nokia phones are still proprietary hardware and even if they were to be able to run an open source symbian version (there isn't one yet), the adaptation layer is still not open source. Ignoring that, S60 itself isn't open source. Ignoring that, Nokia has always attempted to make custom firmware exceedingly difficult (storing flash images as partially encrypted to a specific asic serial number for instance).. of course that may no longer be true. If the encryption is no longer required in the Nokia hardware, then I suppose custom images might be possible by altering binary components in the image. But I hardly think you should 'expect' it to happen.