Symbian – A Little History
The creation of Symbian OS can be traced back to a talented team of software developers at a company called Psion, an early pioneer in the handheld computer market. After successive generations of software for Psion’s handheld devices, the team created an object-oriented operating system called EPOC, which was designed specifically for the unique requirements of mobile computing devices.
Psion realized that there was a need for a mobile OS that could be licensed to other manufacturers for use in their mobile products, and that their EPOC operating system was well suited for this. At the time, the mobile phone industry was looking for a general operating system suitable for mobile phones and was interested in using EPOC. In June 1998, the software team stepped out on their own with the EPOC operating system and Symbian was born. Symbian was formed as a joint venture owned by other major mobile phone manufacturers as well as Psion, with the primary goal of licensing the EPOC operating system and improving it.
Fast forward to today, and we find that Symbian’s operating system – now known as Symbian OS – is a major player in the smartphone marketplace, residing in the majority of today’s smartphone devices. Symbian is jointly owned by Nokia, Panasonic, Psion, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson which, together, represent a major portion of the mobile phone industry.
Symbian OS Overview
Symbian OS was designed from the ground up for mobile communications devices. While some competing operating systems (such as Microsoft’s Smartphone OS) evolved from operating systems written for larger, more resource-laden systems, Symbian OS approached it from the other direction. Symbian’s earlier versions (known as EPOC) would run on devices with as little as 2MB of memory.
Symbian OS is a multitasking operating system with features that include a file system, a graphical user interface framework, multimedia support, a TCP/IP stack and libraries for all the communication features found on smartphones.
Symbian OS has software development kits available for third-party application development. Also, the hardware layers of the operating system are abstracted, so that phone manufacturers can port the OS to the specific requirements of their phone.
One OS, Various Flavors
It is challenging to create an operating system that provides common core capabilities and a consistent programming environment across all smartphones – yet at the same time allow for manufacturers to differentiate their products. Smartphones come in many different shapes and sizes with varying screen sizes and user input capabilities; the user interface software needs to vary to fit these differences.
Symbian OS has a flexible architecture that allows for different user interfaces to exist on top of the core operating system functionality. Of course, it is not wise to be too flexible for two reasons: having too many different user interfaces inhibits code reuse among different devices and too much work is required by the OEM to create a GUI from scratch for their smartphone.
So, to give the phone makers a starting point, Symbian created a few reference platforms, each packaging the Symbian OS core functionality along with a user interface that matched one of the basic smartphone form factors (screen size and input capability). This was important in the beginning; the idea was for smartphone manufacturers to choose the reference platform that most closely matched their phone’s hardware characteristics, and use that as a starting point for their own customized UI layer. This indeed is what happened, and these reference platforms were the origin of the main flavors of Symbian OS you see today – Series 60, UIQ and Series 80.
Symbian OS no longer supports the original user interface reference platforms and the smartphone programmer has no contact with them at all. Instead, the developer uses the software development kit (SDK) for the platform supported by the phone. Also, there is no generic Symbian OS SDK for the developer – all core functionality is included in the particular platform SDK. A typical platform contains about 80% common Symbian code and 20% platform-specific code.
Here are the major platforms for Symbian OS:
Nokia Series 60 This user interface is designed for smartphones that have small displays (176×208 pixel) and where user input is performed with the basic phone keys. Nokia based Series 60 on the Symbian reference design known as Pearl, although Nokia did make significant modifications to it. Series 60 is a popular Symbian user interface for lower cost smartphones and resides in the majority of Symbian OS phones shipped. Phones that use the Series 60 user interface include the Nokia 6600, 7650, 3650. Nokia also licenses the Series 60 user interface to other manufacturers – the Sendo X is an example of a non-Nokia phone that uses Series 60.
Nokia Series 80 Nokia based the Series 80 on a Symbian reference design known as Crystal. Series 80 is designed for phones with a half-VGA screen, a keyboard and hard buttons along the right side of the screen that have dynamic functions as defined by the application. The Nokia 9210/9290 and 9300/9500 communicator devices use the Series 80 user interface.
UIQ This operating system originated from a Symbian reference design known as Quartz. UIQ is owned, developed, maintained and licensed by UIQ Technology AB – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Symbian Ltd. UIQ is designed for pen-based (i.e. touch screen) smartphones with quarter-VGA display and no keyboard. A virtual screen keyboard and handwriting recognition is provided for user input. The Sony Ericsson P800/P900 and Motorola A920 smartphones are examples of phones that use UIQ.
Symbian OS no longer supports or maintains the original Pearl, Crystal and Quartz reference platforms; however, they do maintain an internal platform known as Techview. This UI is used and maintained internally by Symbian to validate development, and is the basis of Symbian’s Training SDKs. Unlike the other UIs, the Training SDK does not support building for any target phone hardware.
Applications
One of the exciting things about smartphones is that you can download and install your own software applications – just like you can on a PC and PDA. The number and type of Symbian OS applications are growing rapidly. Current smartphone applications range from productivity and organizer software, to foreign language translators, multimedia players and editors, games, instant messaging clients, third-party web browsers and many specialized applications that are useful for mobile users.
Symbian OS Smartphones
This section introduces three Symbian OS-based smartphones: the Sony Ericsson P900, Nokia 6600, and Nokia 9500 Communicator. These phones each correspond to a different UI series, as described in the last section, and provide a good sample of the type of smartphones found in the marketplace. All three phones allow you to download Java and C++ software applications and come with basic organizer and game software.
Sony Ericsson P900
The Sony Ericsson P900 (shown in Figure 1.1) is a pen-based smartphone that uses the UIQ user interface. It has a 65K color, 280×320 pixel display with touch screen, virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition, along with many prepackaged organizer and game applications. The device plugs into a cradle that is connected to a PC via USB for downloading applications and synchronizing user data. IR and Bluetooth are also supported. The P900 has an integrated camera that can both take still pictures and record video using MPEG-4. It contains a combination WAP/HTML browser, audio and video playback, email (with attachments), SMS and MMS. The device contains 16MB of memory for user storage and supports an external memory card to expand this.
For communication the P900 supports GSM 800, 1800 and 1900, GPRS and GSM dialup communication.
Nokia 6600
The Nokia 6600 (shown in Figure 1.2) is a Series 60-based phone with a 176×208 pixel, 65K color screen. Following on from the Series 60 model, this device has no touch screen and all input is via the numeric keys as well as two labeled soft-keys.
Like the P900, the device has a camera capable of taking both still pictures and video. The device has Nokia VPN software as well as digital rights management functions, so you can buy and play music that uses this protection. The device has 6MB of user memory and it is expandable by a MMC card. In addition, the built-in software includes a WAP browser and a media player, and it supports email, SMS and MMS. Connectivity to other devices is supported via Bluetooth technology and IR, as well as PC connection via USB.
For communication the 6600 supports GSM 800, 1800 and 1900, GPRS and HSCSD.
Nokia 9500 Communicator
The Nokia 9500 is the latest smartphone in Nokia’s high-end series of phones, known as communicators. Communicators look like traditional mobile phones (although they are a bit heavier), except that the case opens up into an easy to read landscape display and a QWERTY keyboard. Communicators use the Series 80 Symbian OS user interface. They have a 640×200 pixel screen with 4K colors (not a touch screen). The devices include a WAP and HTML browser as well as email and SMS support. User input is via the keyboard (this is the easiest smartphone for entering text) and soft labeled keys along the right side of the display.
The original communicators were Nokia’s 9200 series devices. The Nokia 9290 supports GSM 1900 for the USA, the Nokia 9210 supports GSM 900 and 1800.
The 9200 series communicators, while being the easiest to use of the smartphones due to the large keyboard and screen, have two main drawbacks: their size (they are referred to affectionately as ‘bricks’) and their lack of high-speed data transfer (they only support CSD-style dialup). This however has changed with the recently introduced Nokia 9500 and 9300 communicators.
The Nokia 9500 communicator is smaller and lighter than the 9200 series, and has support for the faster EDGE and GPRS data transfer mechanisms. Also, impressively, it supports WiFi capability as well as Bluetooth technology for local communication. The Nokia 9500 is based on a later version of Symbian OS than the 9200 series phones (v7.0s rather than v6.0), and includes support for multi-homing – the ability to be connected to two connections at the same time (e.g. WiFi and EDGE) – so you may be browsing using EDGE but downloading email at the same time on WiFi, for example. The Nokia 9500 has 80MB of internal memory as well as supporting a MultiMediaCard (MMC). A camera is also included with this phone.
Even smaller than the Nokia 9500 communicator is the Nokia 9300. This phone is the same as a Nokia 9500, except it has no camera and no WiFi communication. However, this communicator is significantly smaller and is aimed at users who are attracted to the usability of a communicator yet turned off by the size and weight of the previous devices.
Other Smartphone Operating Systems
The smartphone market is competitive and so, not surprisingly, there are other choices of smartphone operating system besides Symbian OS. At the time of writing, Symbian OS enjoys a wide lead in this market, but competition is expected to become fierce as smartphones become more popular and manufacturers release more phones not based on Symbian OS. There are many factors that will determine who will ultimately win this market (and sadly not all based on who make the best smartphones), but that’s not the subject of this book.
This section gives a brief overview of three operating systems that compete with Symbian OS for the smartphone market: PalmOS, Microsoft Smartphone OS and Linux.
Palm OS
Palm OS is a major player in the PDA market and has probably done more for creating the mobile handset market than any other company. The Palm PDA products, which started with the Palm Pilot, are known for being simple to use. Palm OS, like Symbian OS, was designed specifically for lower-resource portable devices.
Since Palm is such a major force in the PDA market, and with wireless communication introduced as early as the Palm VII devices, it’s only natural that Palm OS would be a good fit for the smartphone market. One of the biggest advantages is the large number of Palm PDA applications that exist that also can run on their smartphones. There is also a significant base of Palm OS application developers and documentation.
The Handspring Treo 600 is an example of a smartphone based on Palm OS. It supports both GSM and CDMA (via different models). The Treo 600 has all the standard smartphone features, such as SMS, MMS, web browsing and email, as well as the ability to connect to a PC via USB. It has a 160×160 pixel color display, a built-in thumb keyboard and integrated digital camera.
Microsoft Smartphone OS
There is little doubt that Windows is the dominant operating system for the PC, but Microsoft is also gaining a presence in mobile computing devices – including smartphones. This started with the creation of Windows CE for low-resource handheld devices (or other ‘embedded’ devices).
Windows CE uses many of the same APIs and architecture as desktopbased Windows and includes a subset of the Windows user interface suitable for handheld devices. They released the Pocket PC as a PDA, which ran the Windows CE-based OS called Pocket PC OS. Although not as widely used as Palm devices, Pocket PCs are quite significant in the PDA market. As of 2003, the Windows CE and Pocket PC operating systems merged into the Windows Mobile family.
Microsoft also aims to be a dominant player in the smartphone market, and has released another variation of Windows Mobile called Windows Mobile Software for Smartphone. As with Palm OS, an advantage of Windows Mobile is the availability of Pocket PC applications that can be run on Microsoft-based smartphones. In addition to this, it supports miniature versions of many of the applications that are dominant in the desktop PC market – Microsoft Word and Excel, for example.
Other advantages are the large Windows developer base, the abundant programming documentation/knowledge base, and the availability of powerful development tools that have been tailored from desktop Windows to work with mobile operating systems.
An example of a smartphone that uses WindowsMobile is theMotorola MPx200, which has some of the functionality of a Pocket PC, along with a mobile phone’s voice and messaging capability. This smartphone has a 176×220 pixel 65K color screen and supports GSM and GPRS. Another example is the Orange SPV.
Linux
Smartphones based on the open-source Linux operating system have been appearing on the market. There are many advantages to using an open-source operating system like Linux. No cost and the opportunity to tap into the Linux open source community is appealing. This has made Linux grow, not only for the server and PC market space, but also in the embedded device area including handheld computers. Sharp, for example, has released Linux-based PDAs. Linux is not likely to dominate the smartphone market any time soon, but there are smartphones being released for it and it is likely to be popular in some geographical areas, such as Asia. Motorola is a notable supporter of Linux and has released the A760 smartphone based on this OS.
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