The Symbian Foundation also made the trip to Mobile World Congress 2010, with a small booth in Hall 1 (two blocks away from the mighty Microsoft displaying the 7 series) where it took the wraps off its open source Symbian^3 platform.
Symbian^3 brings a host of much-needed improvements and enhancements in three key areas: user interface, multimedia, and performance. It won’t be “feature complete” until the end of the first quarter, and then it will be another four to six months from that point until we see actual devices, but the outlined changes look promising. Symbian^3 takes the UI experience to a whole new level with single tap engagements rather than the in menu options present in devices like the Nokia N97 mini.
There are now Multiple home screens (which can be added by a user as seen in the video) with a widget manager to help you customize each panel with the information you want, such as e-mail, weather, social networking, news feeds, and more. A simple swipe gesture will help you navigate between the screens, and multitouch support enables gestures such as pinching to zoom and flicking to scroll, making Symbian phone use much easier.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdGyZYrix9g[/youtube]
S^3 introduces major advances, which include:
HDMI support enables users to plug their phone into a TV and watch a high-definition movie at 1080p quality without a Blu-ray player.
Music store integration embedded within the radio enables users to identify a song and learn more about it. The addition of a “buy now” button, which links with the user’s chosen music store, makes purchasing easy.
More efficient memory management due to Writeable Data Paging allows more applications to run in parallel for a faster, more complete and efficient multi-tasking experience, especially on mid-range hardware.
A new 2D and 3D graphics architecture takes full advantage of the hardware acceleration available to deliver a faster and more responsive user interface. Users, developers and device creators will all benefit greatly from the visual enhancements and smooth transitions that will significantly improve the look-and-feel of their applications and services. Combined with industry-standard OpenGL ES, the new architecture also provides a great platform for high performance games – all without slowing the phone down.
The industry-leading networking architecture, ready for 4G networks, provides next-generation Internet experiences on today’s devices. Consumers will benefit from the architecture’s ability to seamlessly balance each individual application’s needs regarding factors such as bandwidth, latency and jitter. This improves the consumer’s experience of network-dependent applications and Internet services like VoIP and media content streaming.
One-click connectivity for all applications greatly simplifies the process of connecting to the Internet, without interrupting the user. New global settings allow the user to configure platform-wide behaviour, for example ensuring the device automatically switches from cellular to WLAN when a free WLAN network is available.
Usability enhancements across the user interface include the adoption of a direct “single tap” interaction model, making it much easier to complete common tasks on a device. Multi-touch support for gestures such as “pinch-to-zoom” forms the basis of a gesture framework that can be extended and leveraged by the developer community.
The Homescreen takes a big step forward with support for multiple pages of widgets and a simple flick gesture to move between them. The widget manager makes discovery and download of new widgets simple and support for multiple instances of a native widget means that consumers can monitor multiple weather forecasts, news feeds, social networking accounts or multiple email accounts simultaneously through a common interface.
Symbian^3 is a stepping stone to Symbian^4, which the foundation expects to be completed by the end of the year, bringing a major operating-system overhaul.
