Wikipedia
Symbian may refer to:
- Symbian, a mobile operating system and integrated software platform developed by the Symbian Foundation, originally a proprietary operating system developed by Symbian Ltd.
- Symbian Ltd., the software development and licensing company that produced Symbian OS between its foundation in 1998 and acquisition by Nokia in 2008
- Symbian Foundation, the non-profit foundation created by Nokia to develop the integrated Symbian platform
Symbian was a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. Symbian was originally developed as a closed-source OS for PDAs in 1998 by Symbian Ltd.. Symbian OS was a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and runs 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. 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 Android, as Google and its partners achieved wide adoption.
Symbian OS was (from 2001) essentially a shell system and required an additional user interface (as middleware) to form a complete operating system. Symbian OS became prominent from the S60 (formerly Series 60) platform built by Nokia, first released in 2002 and powering most Nokia smartphones. Symbian eventually became the most widely used smart mobile operating system. UIQ was another Symbian user interface mostly used by Motorola and Sony Ericsson, whereas in Japan there was also the MOAP platform. Applications of these interfaces were not compatible with each other, despite each being built atop Symbian OS. Nokia was the majority shareholder in Symbian Ltd. and purchased the entire share in 2008. 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 UI and UIQ stopped development. Symbian^1 (or S60 5th Edition) was created as a result in 2009. Symbian^2 was only used by carrier NTT DoCoMo, one of the members of the Foundation, for the Japanese market. Symbian^3 was released as in 2010, by which time it became fully open source. Symbian^3 received the Anna and Belle updates in 2011.
The Symbian Foundation disintegrated in late 2010 and Nokia took back control of the OS development. In February 2011, Nokia, by now the only remaining company still supporting Symbian outside Japan, announced that it would use Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform, whilst Symbian would be gradually wound down. Two months later, Nokia moved the OS to closed licensing., and later outsourced Symbian development to Accenture. Although support was promised until 2016, there was little development from Accenture, where most Symbian developers had already left by 2012. In January 2014, Nokia stopped accepting new or changed Symbian software from developers.
The Nokia 808 PureView is officially the last Symbian smartphone from Nokia. However NTT DoCoMo have continued releasing OPP(S) (Operator Pack Symbian, successor of MOAP) devices in Japan, which still act as middleware on top of Symbian. Phones running this include the from Fujitsu and from Sharp in 2014.