We take an in-depth look at the road ahead for Symbian OS as it takes the final few steps towards open source.
There's currently five stages in Symbian's roadmap, starting with the current Symbian^1 found in for instance Nokia's touchscreen phones. According to the Symbian Foundation's page on Twitter, the entire Symbian OS will become open source today. We've put together an overview of Symbian's roadmap moving forward below.
Symbian^2
Symbian^2 is the first open version of the Symbian platform, extending Symbian^1 with a number of features such as offering an active home screen with embedded widgets, improved location-based services as well as offering deeper data integration for third-party enterprise solutions. The Nokia N97 mini is a good example of a Symbian^2 type of device.
Symbian^3
Symbian^3 is currently in the making and will be offering key native improvements to ensure Symbian is competitive in the years ahead. Similar to the move from Symbian^1 to Symbian^2, we will see Symbian^3 devices in the second half of 2010 that will partially offer functionality that will become widely available in Symbian^4 devices.
Among the many new features to be found in Symbian^3, there'll for instance be the New Graphics Architecture (NGA) that enables hardware acceleration of all graphics and video operations. The active home screen will also support multiple pages and a flick gesture to move between them, as well the ability to show multiple instances of a widget (with different content, of course).
Symbian^3 will also start offering "single tap" functionality throughout the touch UI, while apps such as Photos and Video player will get multi-touch gesture support (pinch-to-zoom). The OS will also support HDMI output and storage of large HD files, meaning that Symbian^3 devices can act as a storage device and HD player for HDTVs.
Perhaps most importantly though, Symbian^3 devices will get new memory handling like what's available in Maemo, where a virtual memory will be created in a paging file stored on the device's NAND Flash storage memory. The effect will be noticeable on the same level as the Nokia N900.
Symbian^4
Symbian^4 is expected to be finalized in the second half of 2010, and devices powered by the new OS will be released in early 2011 and beyond. A lot of functionality hidden in Symbian^3 will come to the surface in Symbian^4 courtesy of a new user experience and enhanced applications and services. Near Field Communication (NFC) will also finally find its way to mass-market devices with the introduction of Symbian^4, offering for instance "touch to get more information" where Symbian^4 devices can quickly connect to the increasing amount of NFC-enabled equipment around us.
Given Symbian^4 is still around 12 months away from being ready, and given all the new functionality it aims to provide, it's difficult to say exactly how the Symbian^4 experience will be. However, since it is an open source project there's a lot of information available online that reveals big plans for Symbian OS in the future.
Among all this information there are also three screenshots available as part of a Symbian^4 UI proposal (check them out in our Symbian^4 gallery). This new user interface is dubbed DirectUI, and aims to ensure that the thousands of improvements made in Symbian's various layers beneath will shine. The "single tap" philosophy is expected to play a vital role here. Further improvements to how the active home screen performs in combination with native apps as well as widgets are also expected. The DirectUI will also further improve native app layouts, while the open source technology behind it all (Qt and Orbit) will ensure that third-party developers can take full advantage of the possibilities as well.
Symbian^5
There's naturally little information available about Symbian^5, but a key to Symbian^5 devices will be an overall stable performance for multi-core processors such as the ARM Cortex A9 MPcore. We may see a few Symbian^4 devices with such a processor down the road, but Symbian^5 is expected to take fully advantage of such processor technology and likely make it mainstream. The advantages of multi-core technology are many, especially when it comes to preserving battery life when you're going to play those HD videos on your HDTV as mentioned under Symbian^3.
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