All about Symbian:
ARCchart do allow that the porting process would be possible if technically not an easy feat. This rather understates the difficulty involved. The strength of Symbian is and always has been the fact it has been designed as a mobile OS from the beginning of its life. From release 6 onwards it has been designed with mobile telephony at the heart of the OS. As a result the Symbian OS is structured is some fundamentally different ways to other OS’s. Power and performance management are key considerations in design from the kernel upwards. As a result the Symbian OS is the most powerful mobile OS available. It would require fundamental changes in Linux’s core to achieve similar specifications.
And yet, China has cellphones with mLinux. And this is the OS PalmSource proposes to now create.
Who knows what Nokia has brewing in its labs? The 770 surprised everyone.
Comment by Mike Cane 07.27.05 @ 6:58 amI don’t think that Nokia is leaving Symbian. If it does, its kind of stuff that they doesn’t have any alternative and now symbian is leading platform and working pretty nicely for middle and low-end phones.
But there is big push towards Linux, like Motorola has been jumped to Linuxphone wagon already, and there is other companies also.. so Nokia people need least compare their symbian develoment with Linux dev. Another thing is that highend phones are so much powerful and there is need for advanced stuff which in linux you can port from computer platform. It is asset when we are comparing it with situation where you have to code stuff from scratch or make lot more coding (like in symbian or pocketpc). So in highend phones and pda:s there is real competition situation, but in lowend its is more like evolution and symbian is just coming in..
Comment by zache_ 07.27.05 @ 12:14 pmLinux has been used for a long time in small devices such as the ucLinux project, so performance
shouldn’t be an issue.
Btw, will the 770 have a JVM installed? And what is the programming language used usually by Nokia apps developers?
Yeah, Nokia can’t afford to abandon Symbian right now with all its powerful mobile features, such as the ability to leak memory on every getResourceAsStream call!
Comment by Nokia In My Trachea 07.27.05 @ 6:04 pmBTW: http://gnomedesktop.org/node/2333
Comment by Mike Cane 07.27.05 @ 7:44 pm