SYMBIAN PLATFORM

ROADMAP OVERVIEW
Hamish Willee
Consultant
Symbian Foundation
What I’ll be talking about…

• Symbian Foundation and

platform
• The Roadmap
• Evolving the Developer
Experience
The most widely used mobile platform today (and it’s open)
Used in 47% of smartphones worldwide
79 million handsets shipped in 2009 (330million+ total)
Over 100,000 man years of development.
Source: Canalts 2009
What are we and who owns
us?
• What is the Symbian Foundation?
– We’re an open source software project
– We’re led by our members

• Unique in that our processes are

transparent, both technically and in terms
of governance. We are inclusive. Plans
are shared and anyone can help shape
our direction.
Open source

• Biggest proprietary to OSS project ever

• Whole platform available under OSS

licence from Symbian^3
– Mostly EPL. Some under compatible license (e.g. LGPL)
– Anyone can access the source code
– Anyone can build on it, make things with it and sell what they make
without paying a royalty to the owner of the source code
– People can contribute code back to the platform

• Symbian^2 still partially SFL

Growth And Momentum
New contributors to the roadmap every month

The future
Day 1 June End 2009
 The Symbian Platform
February 2010
Roadmap
So what’s new in February?
Hot news
developer.symbian.org/roadm
ap
Fully open On the 4th February Symbian completed conversion
of the Symbian platform to fully open source
licenses, removing membership as a barrier to
engagement. The tool chain will follow during H1
2010.

Podcasts A new app for the platform, Podcasts allows the

user to easily download podcasts and manage
app subscriptions. It is being contributed into
Symbian^3 from an existing open source project.

New web More details are becoming clear around

browser and Symbian^4. Contribution proposals submitted in
January include plans to re-architect the browser
web runtime and the web widget runtime environment to build
both on top of Qt and take advantage of the latest
Webkit.
 Now H1 2010 H2 2010 H1 2011

The first platform release hosted by the Symbian Foundation

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian^2

Kits Complete Handsets

available Now From H1 2010

Evolution across the platform, a big step forward in user experience

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian^3

Kits Complete Handsets

available Q1 2010 From H2 2010

A revolution in user experience, built on Qt

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian^4

Kits Complete Handsets

Q1 2010 Q3 2010 From H1 2011

February
2010
Notes: “Complete” equates to functional
completion. “Handsets” dates are a guide based
on a typical 3-9 month gap between “Complete”
and first handset shipment. Actual device
shipment dates are the domain of device creators.
 User experience
Developer experience
Device creator
experience
The
1 roadmap – evolving experiences

S^1 S^2 S^3 S^4 S^5

The
2 roadmap – release summaries
Evolving the user
experience
Making Symbian devices delightful to use

S^ S^
3 4
Devices Devices
From H2 2010 From H1 2011

Easier to use: Single tap across the A fresh new

UI, support for gestures such as pinch look for all
and flick applications,
based on Qt.
Faster: ScreenPlay uses hardware
acceleration to deliver a blazingly fast Direct access
UI to key
functionality
Watch HD movies and play games on
and beautiful
TV via HDMI
effects and
Improved Homescreen: Multiple transitions in
pages, new widget manager, more a streamlined
powerful widgets user interface

New app: Podcasts

…
re
Radio app: “Buy now” from music
s mo
stores l ot
d
An
One click connectivity makes
Symbian^4 UI refresh
A whole new look, a whole new feel

New user experience built on Qt

Integrated menu frees up valuable screen
space
New toolbar provides direct access to
commands
Long touch unlocks context-specific
actions
Beautiful effects and transitions

A complete refresh of the app suite

S^
Coming in 4

Devices
From H1 2011

Sneak peak:
http://qt.gitorious.org/uiemo/uiemo-preview
Evolving the device creator
experience
Making it easy to make devices
2010 2011

S^ S^ S^
3 4 5

Writeable Data
Paging Improved memory management enables
better performance on low cost hardware

ScreenPlay
Take full advantage of graphics hardware
acceleration to deliver a fast and engaging
UI

Localised to 40+ locales

A great basis for targeting markets
worldwide

SHAI
Making hardware adaptation cheaper and
easier, getting devices to market more
quickly

Multicore
Supporting the next generation of
hardware platforms
Evolving the developer
experience
What does the Symbian platform offer to developers?
Web Runtime
The easiest way into developing for mobile
devices – WRT allows web developers to directly
re-use their skills in HTML, CSS, Javascript and
AJAX to create Homesceen widgets and stand-
alone applications
WRT is heavily reworked in S^4 to run on top of
Qt and take advantage of the latest Webkit.
S^4 also sees extended support for the evolving
W3C widget standards.
Rich Middleware
Symbian is a great platform for powerful
applications that take full advantage of the
opportunities of mobile.
Its breadth already includes the leading
location subsystem and there’s lots more
coming in S^3…
Integrate gesture support into your app UI
Make use of sensors such as accelerometer
Set up peer-to-peer networks with Zeroconf
Easily integrate web services using the Social
Mobile Framework
Qt
Widely used across many platforms and loved by
developers, Qt is an extremely powerful and easy
to use application framework.
It becomes the primary application
framework in S^4, bringing all of its advantages
S^ to Symbian app developers everywhere
4
S^ Qt Mobility APIs will provide an ever richer Qt-
4
based experience
A Powerful OS
Designed from the ground up for networked
mobile devices, the Symbian platform is efficient,
scaleable and secure.
FreeWay and One Click Connectivity deliver
an awesome networking experience to
applications
S^
3
ScreenPlay allows applications to take full
S^ advantage of graphics hardware acceleration to
3
provide a great-looking UI
Writeable Demand Paging leaves more
S^
memory free for running applications
4
Qt
New application and UI framework
“Cut development time by nearly 50%”
“Reduces code by more than 50%”
“Deploy 50% faster because of better code
maintainability”

Google Earth VLC KDE

94% 76%

“Qt meets or exceeds “Qt has increased my

100,000+ developers my expectations” productivity”
5000+ companies working with
Qt
Widely used Loved by developers

Animations … Physics … Transitions

Kinetic scrolling … 3D effects
Gestures … Multitouch
Integrated Modular Scales to fit
Webkit architecture hardware
rendering allows easy capabilities
engine extension

Strong architecture Delivering stunning effects

 Qt
New application and UI framework

Up to and S^ S^ S^
and
including 2 3 4
beyond…
Devices Devices Devices
From H1 2010 From H2 2010 From H1 2011

Qt adopted as the
primary runtime for
Qt runtime applications
Qt runtime available to integrated into
download and install Symbian^3 kits
and available for UI Extension for Mobile
inclusion in devices provide enhanced Qt-
based controls

Platform applications
ported to Qt and Uiemo
Social mobile framework
So much stuff to share, so many sites, so little time.

See friends’ tweets through your phonebook <Your favourite

Surf their photos from your gallery web services
Your web life available in any app, right where you here>
want it

S^
Symbian’s Social Mobile Framework 4

A core set of libraries that ease integration of web

services into applications

An extendable framework allowing adaptors for

individual services to be added

Brought to you by:

More than just C++ and
widgets
• Python
– Now part of the platform!

• Flash
• Java ME
• Others…
Get involved
http://developer.symbian.org/

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/W
Thank you!