Shortly after Symbian announced that every single line of Symbian code is now open source, Symbian's CEO, Lee M. Williams, turned to Twitter (see a video of the event on YouTube) to make sure Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates got the news early:
@billgates @stevejobs Wanted to let you know that we have 4.5 Billion worth of free @symbian code available. Hugs and kisses. Lee
Four months ahead of schedule, Symbian OS is now open source. Symbian^3 is expected to be feature complete by the end of this quarter, while Symbian^4 is expected to reach the same milestone sometime in the second half of this year. We recently outlined the road ahead for Symbian OS, revealing that the Symbian Foundation does not intend to let competitors take over the smartphone world.
A lot of the upcoming functionality in Symbian OS is pretty fresh, but at the current development speed (which has obviously seen a heavy boost over the last year) it looks like the operating system will rapidly get up to speed as far as many critical high-end capabilities in today's market are concerned.
Both Apple and Microsoft are expected to roll out new consumer functionality as well though, and Google currently plays a strong role in moving mobile devices towards Web-oriented services and content.
However, if the Symbian Foundation is able to come up with an operating system that takes a middle-road, as it currently looks like, there's no doubt that the potential for success would make manufacturers devote significant resources to crank out Symbian phones in the future.
Additionally, one of the new key improvements in Symbian for manufacturers is also to make their development cycles shorter and subsequently cheaper. That's a pretty strong selling-point in today's market as well.
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