Open-source Symbian platform development roadmap Disclosure

Last year, Nokia announced the acquisition of all its shares in Symbian and donated all its technologies and patents to the newly established Symbian Foundation to develop future open-source Symbian operating systems. However, since the announcement of this important turning point, no messages have been sent about the next generation of Symbian operating systems. It is inevitable that the research and development of the Symbian system is stuck due to the huge changes in the organizational structure.

 

A few days ago, the Symbian Foundation's executive vice president David Wood finally revealed in his blog the future of Symbian systems. Surprisingly, he said that the Symbian system will be upgraded twice a year in the future. Currently, at least three Symbian system versions have been developed, in the future, there may be more than five types.

 

It is said that the Foundation's first Symbian platform, codenamed Symbian ^ 2, will be developed based on the existing s60 5.1. This year, the function will be expanded and the Stability Improvement and testing will be completed by the end of the year. It is expected that, around the end of this year, the first smart phone of the Symbian ^ 2 platform may enter the market. After that, the development process of Symbian ^ 3 lags behind six months. Function expansion will be completed by the end of this year and will be stable by the middle of next year.

For example, the development of the Symbian system has two important time points:"Functionally complete"And"Hardened". When to reach these stages represents the entire open source developmentCommunityDetermined by the "Release Council.

"Functionally complete"Previously, developers could add new features and new features to the system of this version.

"Functionally complete"To"Harded"Developers mainly test the system to improve stability and correct defects.

"Harded"Later, the Symbian system of this version enters the stable stage and the product is commercially available. The developer can still perform patch correction within the next year, but the main focus has been on the next version.

 

Therefore, the development cycle of the open-source Symbian system is as follows:

Every six months, each version will go through various stages of development in sequence, and then be released on a stable basis. The subsequent lifecycle will be one year. Therefore, at the same time, the number of systems in the development process will reach 5:

S ^ nIn the "harden" stability enhancement phase.

Two early systemsN-1 s ^AndN-2 s ^In a stable stage, it is a mainstream system provided to the vendor.

S ^ n + 1In the rich feature stage, developers can provide new features.

S ^ n + 2It is in the early version testing stage.

 

Finally, we will discuss that the features of Symbian ^ 2 have been basically frozen. Next we will conduct stability tests and improvements. Most of the content of Symbian ^ 3 has been approved, but developers are still allowed to submit new content. However, Symbian ^ 4 is still in the public discussion stage.