Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Symbian OS 9.5, fitter, happier, more productive...
Sorry for the Radiohead reference. I meant faster and better, according to Exclusive - Symbian OS v9.5: More Than A Free Mobile Performance Lunch. 9.5 seems like a major step forward, despite the .x version upgrade.
As opposed to a certain other company that also provides an OS and application environment for mobile phones, Symbian has taken action to lower memory and performance needs, which is a good thing, as that makes Symbian OS useful in more phones than today, and I'm sure that's Symbian's goal, competing with proprietary system solutions.
Other interesting improvements are on demand paging, file system caching, an SQL database (complementing the existing DBMS), IP packet priority etc. Features PC OSs have had for years, but that haven't made much sense for mobile phones until now.
A note about availability: 'We expect to see the first phones based on Symbian OS v9.5 to start shipping sometime in 2008. However, it's entirely possible that some v9.5 features will be delivered into v9.3 or v9.4. It's not been uncommon for us to release features in earlier versions once they've been verified in their target release.'
Before 9.5 will be in phones Nokia and UIQ must adapt their UI/application environments to the new version.
This should be interesting to Symbian developers: 'it retains full backward binary compatibility for public APIs with earlier v9 releases'
As opposed to a certain other company that also provides an OS and application environment for mobile phones, Symbian has taken action to lower memory and performance needs, which is a good thing, as that makes Symbian OS useful in more phones than today, and I'm sure that's Symbian's goal, competing with proprietary system solutions.
Other interesting improvements are on demand paging, file system caching, an SQL database (complementing the existing DBMS), IP packet priority etc. Features PC OSs have had for years, but that haven't made much sense for mobile phones until now.
A note about availability: 'We expect to see the first phones based on Symbian OS v9.5 to start shipping sometime in 2008. However, it's entirely possible that some v9.5 features will be delivered into v9.3 or v9.4. It's not been uncommon for us to release features in earlier versions once they've been verified in their target release.'
Before 9.5 will be in phones Nokia and UIQ must adapt their UI/application environments to the new version.
This should be interesting to Symbian developers: 'it retains full backward binary compatibility for public APIs with earlier v9 releases'
