Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 18:46 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Ahead of schedule, the Symbian Foundation has released the source code to Symbian's EKA2 real-time, multitasking, SMP microkernel, under the Eclipse Public License. It comes with a complete development kit, free of charge. The Foundation's plan is to open up the entire platform, and this is of course a very important milestone in that process.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
This statement is just dumb. Symbian was based on EPOC, which was developed by Psion, a highly innovative and forward-thinking mobile device manufacturer. At the time EPOC came out (1997), the 32-bit, multi-threaded, object-oriented platform it offered was cutting edge. Also, Nokia had had years of experience making some of the best, most useable mobile phones out there before they started working on Symbian (with help from Psion).
Of course you are right, as EPOC32's history goes back to 1997, but then by that measure the current versions of Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are even bigger relics, since the origins of their codebases are all significantly older. The best comparison to Symbian is Windows Mobile, as the first version of Windows CE was released at around the same time as the first version of EPOC32.
Admittedly both Symbian and Windows Mobile are hampered by the fact that they were designed at a time when 1GHz CPUs, powerful 3D graphics, gobs of memory, and multitouch on a mobile device were unthinkable. So of course they have a disadvantage in some respects. However, I don't think this means they are beyond hope, especially as in the case of Symbian, Qt will become the top-level API.
Edited 2009-10-24 08:57 UTC