It was Symbian which showed people what smartphone is, what it feels to have the world at your fingertips and the immense power of technology
Symbian OS was originally developed by Symbian Ltd. It is a descendant of Psion’s EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed.
On February 11, 2011, Nokia announced that it would migrate away from Symbian to Windows Phone. In June 22, 2011 Nokia has made an agreement with Accenture as an outsourcing program that Accenture will provide Symbian based software development and support services to Nokia through 2016. The platform has probably gained a boost since going to Accenture
When it came into being, it was the only contestant in the market, and far ahead of all the competition. It’s disheartening to see how development became stagnant in the later years and other platforms overtook it in the last few years
Symbian OS was subject to a variety of viruses, however, all of them failed to damage the phone as there were no prominent loopholes in the OS. With a view that the average mobile phone user shouldn’t have to worry about security, Symbian OS 9.x adopted a UNIX-style capability model (permissions per process, not per object). Installed software is theoretically unable to do damaging things (such as costing the user money by sending network data) without being digitally signed – thus making it traceable
Due to this huge failure of virus in Symbian, hackers lost interest in the platform, & currently there’s not a single active Symbian virus in the wild. (Maybe that’s why many people started to hate the platform, cause they couldn’t threaten it)
With a good update via Anna, & Belle in the pipeline, Symbian is looking good to give the big boys a run for their money. Since it’s declaration of death in Feb ’11, Symbian has seen more activity, than it ever did in whole lifetime
With an enormous user base , and millions of fan, the platform is still going strong.
Rumors of Carla and Donna, & of the N8 successor has increased the expectation from Nokia. It’s big time for Nokia that they step up to the challenge & sweep with floor like they use to
By Anand, for Symbian Developers
