ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank everyone who helped to see this seminar to completion. In particular, I would like to thank my seminar coordinator Ms. Renu for her moral support and guidance to complete my seminar on time. I express my gratitude to all my friends and classmates for their support and help in this seminar without which this seminar would not have been successful..

ABSTRACT
Symbian Platform is designed for the Smart phones environment. The Symbian platform is an open source operating system (OS) and software platform designed for smartphones and maintained by the Symbian Foundation. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS. When Nokia acquired the former Symbian Software Limited in 2008 a new independent non-profit organization called the Symbian Foundation was established. One of its main goals was to create the Symbian platform used on more than 330 million mobile phones worldwide as a royalty-free, open source software. Now, less than two full years later and four months ahead of schedule that goal has become a reality with the foundation announcing the completed open source release of the Symbian platform source code. The Symbian platform was officially made available as open source code in February 2010. The Symbian platform has been developed over 10 years and is still the worlds most widely used smartphone platform. In fact, Symbian boasts nearly as much market share as all of its competitors combined - including the iPhone. However, Symbian was seen as being on the wane and the move to open source is designed to arrest its decline and reinvigorate the platform. As well as opening up a huge market for software developers an open-source Symbian also provides an alternative to Android for smartphone manufacturers that dont want to cosy up to Google. And it goes without saying that existing Symbian smartphone users stand to benefit through the creation of new features and applications.

Now that any individual or organization can take, use and modify the Symbian code for any purpose, whether it be for a mobile device or something else entirely, it is hoped there will be greater potential for innovation and faster time-to-market for new features and applications. Symbians openness also extends to the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. And the Symbian Foundation says that now that the platform is open source anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute to new features.

CONTENTS

1.

INTRODUCTION

2.

SYMBIAN PLATFORM

3.

EVOLUTION OF SYMBIAN

4.

FEATURES OF SYMBIAN PLATFORM

5.

ARCHITECTURE

6.

VERSION HISTORY

7.

ARCHITECTURE

8.

CONCLUSION

9.

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION
Way back then, communication was manifested in the form of more traditional telecommunication systems. Due to a number of inconveniences such methods had, manufacturers made numerous research and development efforts in order to come up with new technologies that would surpass the capabilities of old devices. Today, the market is swarming with powerful and highly-advanced communication units, which chiefly encompass wireless technologies, such as mobile phones and portable computers. Mobile phones play an important role in today's technologically-advanced community in such a way that they allow users to communicate with others from anywhere in the world. Modern mobile phones appear in a variety of forms, which include camera phones and smartphones, among others. Speaking of smartphones, these devices are the most popular among mobile phone types. Due to their multimedia capabilities, smartphones extend the importance and utility of mobile phones not only as a reliable communication device but as a compact entertainment gadget, as well.

The Google open source platform for smartphones, Android, was utilized in less than 2 percent of smartphones in 2009; in October, Gartner predicted a seven-fold increase in global Android-based handsets by 2012 (MaximumPC.com). The position of Android will present competition to the topranked operating system (OS) Symbian OS. According to MaximumPC.com, in 2009, Symbian was used in almost half of all smartphones. Gartner predicts this figure will decrease to 39% of smartphones in 2010. Symbian is owned by Nokia and is heavily used by Nokias smartphones such as the Nokia X6 though some Nokia models use the companys other proprietary OS, Maemo. Sony Ericsson is another key Symbian hardware partner. The approach used by Symbian is similar to Google design an open operating system and allow anyone to make hardware for it. However, unlike Google, Symbians owner Nokia has pushed more proprietary first-party hardware models (Google only launch one official hardware device the Nexus One and even that it contracted HTC to design the hardware). Symbians move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet.

SYMBIAN PLATFORM

Symbian platform, designed from the start for mobile devices, the Symbian platform is a real time, multi-tasking OS specifically architected to run well on resource-constrained systems, maximising performance and battery life whilst minimising memory usage. The Symbian platform was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., including Symbian OS assets at its core, the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces. The Symbian^3 was designed to be a more next generation smartphone platform. It is being actively developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation, following the official launch of the Symbian Foundation in April 2009 . The Symbian Foundation was first announced in June 2008. Its objective was to publish the source for the entire Symbian platform under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). However, components within Symbian OS were licensed from third parties which prevented the foundation from publishing the full source under EPL immediately, instead initially much of the source was published under a more restrictive Symbian Foundation License (SFL) and available to foundation member companies only. The completion of the open-sourcing of the Symbian Platform was achieved with the release of Symbian 3 on February 4,2010.

EVOLUTION OF SYMBIAN
1.Symbian OS 2.S60(Software Platform) 3.UIQ(User Interface Quartz) 4.MOAP(Mobile Oriented Application Platform) 5.Symbian Platform

Symbian OS : Symbian OS is the advanced, open operating system designed for the specific requirements of advanced 2G, 2.5G and 3G mobile phones. It addresses constraints of mobile phones by providing a framework to handle low memory situations, a power management model, and a rich software layer implementing industry standards for communications, telephony and data rendering. Symbian OS is proven on several platforms. It started life as the operating system for the Psion series of consumer PDA products (including Series 5mx, Revo and netBook), and various adaptations by Diamond, Oregon Scientific and Ericsson. The first dedicated mobile phone incorporating Symbian OS was the Ericsson R380. Symbian OS combines the power of an integrated applications environment with mobile telephony, bringing advanced data services to the mass market. It includes a robust multitasking kernel, integrated telephony support, communications protocols, data management, advanced graphics support, a low-level user interface framework and a variety of application engines.

S60 (software platform): The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. S60 is currently amongst the most-used smartphone platforms in the world. It was created by Nokia, who made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. S60 is built on top of Symbian OS. It is the UI layer of the phone software (called Avkon). S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, PIM tools, and Helixbased multimedia players. It is intended to power fully-featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones. The S60 software is a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, Python and Adobe Flash.

Originally, the most distinguishing feature of S60 phones was that they allowed users to install new applications after purchase.

UIQ(User Interface Quartz): UIQ (formerly known as User Interface Quartz) by UIQ Technology is a software platform based upon Symbian OS. Essentially this is a graphical user interface layer that provides additional components to the core OS, to enable the development of feature-rich mobile phones that are open to expanded capabilities through third-party applications. Native applications can be written in C++ using the Symbian/UIQ SDK. All UIQ-based phones (2.x and 3.x) also support Java applications. With the establishment of Symbian Foundation, UIQ will cease to exist. S60 is the UI choice of Symbian Foundation; UIQ will contribute its assets to the foundation.

MOAP(Mobile Oriented Application Platform): MOAP (Mobile Oriented Applications Platform) is the software platform for NTT DoCoMo's FOMA service for mobile phones. Manufacturers mobile devices that uses MOAP are Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson, Mitsubishi, Sharp, etc. MOAP is not an open development unlike the rest Symbian OS UI. MOAP release under EPL from Symbian Foundation. There are two versions of MOAP:

MOAP(S) is supported by Symbian OS based phones from a number of manufacturers such as Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson Japan, Mitsubishi, Sharp and others. Unlike Series 60 and UIQ, other platforms based on Symbian, MOAP(S) is not an open development platform. MOAP(S) is released as opensource from Symbian Foundation under EPL. MOAP(L) is supported by Linux-based phones from Panasonic and NEC. MOAP(L) is also not an open development platform. Symbian Platform: The Symbian platform was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia,NTT Docomo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd. including Symbian OS assets at its core, the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces. It is being actively developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation since its launch in 2009. Symbian Foundation announced the completion of releasing the entire Symbian platform as open source under EPL(Eclipse Public License) on 4 February 2010.

FEATURES OF SYMBIAN PLATFORM

USER INTERFACE: Symbian platform has had a native graphics toolkit since its inception, known as avkon. S60 was designed to be manipulated by a keyboard-like interface metaphor . Avkon-based software is binarycompatible with Symbian platforms up to and including Symbian^3. Symbian^4 introduces Orbit, a Qt-based GUI library far better-suited to a touch-based interface. Moreover, most pure-Qt applications can run unmodified or with minimal changes. Orbit provides transitions, animations, and state framework, as well as possessing all of the existing strengths of Qt. Qt provides a rich set of standard user interface elements (known as widgets), including: buttons, progress bars, labels, combo boxes and frames, editors for text, numbers and dates, spin boxes, dials and even a calendar widget. Layout managers allow developers to have precise control over the relative positioning and size of child widgets within a parent widget area. Layout managers automatically reposition and resize child widgets as necessary when the contents change for example the window grows or shrinks, fonts change, widgets are hidden. Layouts are very important on the Symbian platform.

BROWSER: Symbian^3 and earlier have a native WebKit based browser; indeed, Symbian was the first mobile platform to make use of WebKit (in June 2005). In Symbian^4, a new browser was introduced, based on WebKit and Qt.

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: Symbian OS previously used a Symbian specific C++ version along with Carbide.c++ IDE as the native application development environment, however it has been possible to write applications using Python and Flash. From 2010, Symbian switched to using standard C++ with Qt as the SDK, which can be used with either Qt Creator or Carbide. Qt supports the older Symbian S60 3rd and 5th editions, as well as the new Symbian platform. It also supports Maemo and Meego, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X .

ARCHITECTURE

Technology domains and packages:

The Symbian platform is subdivided into technology domains, each of which comprises a number of software packages. Each technology domain has its own roadmap, and the Symbian Foundation has a team of technology managers who manage these technology domain roadmaps. Every package is allocated to exactly one technology domain, based on the general functional area to which the package contributes and by which it may be influenced. By grouping related packages by themes, the Symbian Foundation hopes to encourage a strong community to form around them and to generate discussion and review. The Symbian System Model illustrates the scope of each of the technology domains across the platform packages. Packages are owned and maintained by a package owner, a named individual from an organization member of the Symbian Foundation, who accepts code contributions from the wider Symbian community and is responsible for package.

Symbian kernel:
The Symbian kernel (EKA2) supports sufficiently-fast real-time response to build a single-core phone around itthat is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack. Symbian has a microkernel architecture that contains the basic minimum functionality for maximum robustness, availability and responsiveness. It contains a scheduler, memory management and device drivers; with networking, telephony and filesystem support services in the OS Services Layer or the Base Services Layer. The inclusion of device drivers means the kernel is not a true microkernel. The EKA2 real-time kernel, which has been termed a nanokernel, contains only the most basic primitives and requires an extended kernel to implement any other abstractions.

VERSION HISTORY

Symbian^1, as the first release, forms the basis for the platform. It incorporates Symbian OS and S60 5th Edition (which is built on Symbian OS 9.4) and thus it was not made available as open source.

Symbian^2 was the first royalty-free version of Symbian. While portions of Symbian^2 are EPL licensed, most of the source code is under the proprietary SFL license and available only to members of the Symbian Foundation. On June 1, 2010, a number of Japanese companies including DoCoMo and Sharp announced smartphones using Symbian^2.

Symbian^3 was announced on 15 February 2010. This is the first fully open source version of Symbian, following the completion of the release of the entire Symbian codebase earlier that month. This marked a transition from a focus on feature submission and stability into the hardening phase. The Symbian^3 release introduced new features such as HDMI support, a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture, and UI improvements, such as improved consistency. It has single tap menus and up to three customizable homescreens. The current release date for Symbian^3 SDK is October 2010. The first phones running the open source version of the platform will be Symbian^3 phones; four such phones, the Nokia N8, C6-01, E7 and C7 have been announced.

Symbian^4 is expected to be released in the first half of 2011. Symbian^4 provides an entirely new user experience built with Qt. The on-screen layout of applications will be updated and navigation will be streamlined to provide a simpler and more fluent user experience. The suite of platform applications themselves is being re-designed and re-organised to support this elegant and accessible paradigm, features being grouped to maximise ease of use. The user interface will take full advantage of Symbian's powerful graphics architecture to incorporate visually appealing effects such as transparency and transitions. This all adds up to a winning user experience for devices based on Symbian^4 that will reflect well on all applications.

CONCLUSION

The transition to open source isn't necessarily all wine and roses, though. As different developers take the open source code in different directions, there is a risk of the platform forking and creating some confusion. But as far as it is concerned it has improved the features like data flow performance, support for multi-touch, improved graphics, better multi-tasking and improved location services.

REFERENCES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform http://developer.symbian.org http://www.symbian.org http://www.mobgold.com http://www.ohloh.net/p/symbian http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Symbian http://arstechnica.com

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KURUKSHETRA

SYMBIAN PLATFORM SEMINAR REPORT

Submitted by: Chinlianmanga R.no - 108230, IT4