Developer | Nokia |
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Marketing target | Smartphones |
Support status | |
Unsupported |
The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) was a software platform for smartphones that runs on top of the Symbian operating system. It was created by Nokia based on the 'Pearl' user interface from Symbian Ltd. [1] It was introduced at COMDEX in November 2001 and first shipped with the Nokia 7650 smartphone. The platform has since seen 5 updated editions. Series 60 was renamed to S60 in November 2005.
In 2008, the Symbian Foundation was formed to consolidate all the assets of different Symbian platforms (S60, UIQ, MOAP), making it open source. In 2009, based on the code base of S60, the first iteration of the platform since the creation of Symbian Foundation was launched as S60 5th Edition, or Symbian^1, on top of Symbian OS 9.4 as its base. Subsequent iterations were named Symbian^2 (Japanese market only) and Symbian^3.
The S60 software was a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, Python [2] and Adobe Flash. Its API was called Avkon UI. [3] S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, personal information manager (PIM) tools, and Helix-based multimedia players. It was intended to power fully featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones.
Originally, the most distinguishing feature of S60 phones was that they allowed users to install new applications after purchase. Unlike a standard desktop platform, however, the built-in apps are rarely upgraded by the vendor beyond bug fixes. New features are only added to phones while they are being developed rather than after public release. Certain buttons are standardized, such as a menu key, a four way joystick or d-pad, left and right soft keys and a clear key.
S60 was mainly used by Nokia but they also licensed it to a few other manufacturers, including Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung, [4] Sendo, [5] Siemens Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Solstice and Vertu. Sony Ericsson notably was the main vendor using the competing UIQ Symbian interface.
In addition to the manufacturers the community includes:
There have been four major releases of S60: "Series 60" (2001), "Series 60 Second Edition" (2002), "S60 3rd Edition" (2005) and "S60 5th Edition" (2008). Each release had an updated version called Feature Pack, sometimes known as relay. Each runs on a different Symbian version.
Many devices are capable of running the S60 software platform with the Symbian OS. Devices ranging from the early Nokia 7650 running S60 v0.9 on Symbian OS v6.1, [8] [9] to the latest Samsung i8910 Omnia HD running S60 v5.0 on Symbian OS v9.4. [10] In Symbian^3 the version of the revised platform is v5.2.
The table lists devices carrying each version of S60 as well as the Symbian OS version on what it is based. Note that new devices since Symbian^3 May be capable of upgrading to later systems, such as Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle. Therefore, you may see a device being listed more than once.
Symbian is now[ when? ] progressing through a period of organisational change to metamorph into an open source software platform project. As an OS, Symbian OS originally provided no user interface (UI), the visual layer that runs atop an operating system. This was implemented separately. Examples of Symbian UIs are MOAP; Series 60; Series 80; Series 90 and UIQ. This separation of UI from underlying OS has created both flexibility and some confusion in the market place. The Nokia purchase of Symbian was brokered with the involvement of the other UI developers and all major user interface layers have been (or have been pledged to be) donated to the open source foundation who will independently own the Symbian operating system. The new Symbian Foundation has announced its intent to unify different Symbian UIs into a single UI based on the S60 platform. (Announcements made in March 2009 indicated this would be the S60 5th edition with feature pack 1).
On 12 April 2011, Nokia announced Symbian Anna as a software update to the Symbian^3 release. Three new devices (500, X7 and E6) were announced which will have Symbian Anna pre-installed. Symbian Anna will be available as a Software Update for Symbian^3 based devices as well. Most Significant updates that come with "Anna" are
On 24 August 2011, Nokia announced Symbian Belle (later renamed Nokia Belle) [15] as a software update to the Symbian Anna release. Three new devices (603, 700 and 701) [Nokia 600 is cancelled and is replaced with Nokia 603] were announced which will have Symbian Belle pre-installed. Symbian Belle was available as a Software Update for Symbian Anna-based devices as well. Most Significant updates that came with "Belle" were
In November 2011, Nokia announced the Carla and Donna updates. Carla was expected to be released in late 2012 or early 2013 and feature a new web browser, new widgets, new NFC capabilities and Dolby Surround audio enhancement. Donna was going to be a dual-core processor exclusive, and was planned to be released late 2013 or early 2014. [16] In May 2012 a Nokia executive claimed that Carla and Donna were cancelled, and that Nokia would instead only release Belle Feature Pack 2 later in 2012, lacking many of the new features that were planned for Carla and Donna. [17]
In February 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft to adopt Windows Phone 7 as Nokia's primary operating system, leaving further Symbian development in question. Nokia has promised support for Symbian and its newer devices until at least 2016, but no new Symbian devices will be released after Nokia 808 PureView. On 29 April 2011, Nokia announced that it would transfer Symbian activities to Accenture along with 3,000 employees.
Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices. Java ME was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition or J2ME.
Symbian Ltd. was a software development and licensing consortium company, known for the Symbian operating system (OS), for smartphones and some related devices. Its headquarters were in Southwark, London, England, with other offices opened in Cambridge, Sweden, Silicon Valley, Japan, India, China, South Korea, and Australia.
UIQ is a discontinued software platform based upon Symbian OS, created by UIQ Technology AB. It is a graphical user interface layer that provides additional components to the core operating system, to enable the development of feature-rich mobile phones that are open to expanded capabilities through third-party applications.
The Nokia N70 is a 3G mobile phone from Nokia. It was announced as part of the Nokia's new line of multimedia smartphones, the Nseries, on 27 April 2005. It started shipping in September 2005. It runs on the S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 on Symbian v8.1 operating system. It was succeeded by the Nokia N73. The N70 was popular and sold well.
Nokia Series 40, often shortened as S40, is a software platform and application user interface (UI) software on Nokia's broad range of mid-tier feature phones, as well as on some of the Vertu line of luxury phones. It was one of the world's most widely used mobile phone platforms and found in hundreds of millions of devices. Nokia announced on 25 January 2012 that the company has sold over 1.5 billion Series 40 devices. It was not used for smartphones, with Nokia turning first to Symbian, then in 2012–2017 to Windows Phone, and most recently Android. However, in 2012 and 2013, several Series 40 phones from the Asha line, such as the 308, 309 and 311, were advertised as "smartphones" although they do not actually support smartphone features like multitasking or a fully fledged HTML browser.
The Series 90 is a platform for mobile phones that use Symbian OS. It was developed by Nokia in collaboration with Psion. It was released in 2003 and was going to be the platform for the Nokia 7700 which was cancelled, but did eventually make it to market with the Nokia 7710.
Nokia's Series 80 is a discontinued, short-lived mobile software platform for their enterprise and professional level smartphones, introduced in 2000. It uses the Symbian OS. Common physical properties of this Symbian OS user interface platform are a screen resolution of 640×200 pixels and a full QWERTY keyboard. Series 80 used the large size of the Communicator screens to good effect, but software had to be developed specifically for it, for a relatively small market.
Nokia Browser for Symbian was the default web browser for the S60 and Symbian mobile phone platform. The browser is based on a port of Apple Inc.'s open-source WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks which form the WebKit rendering engine that Apple uses in its Safari Web browser.
UIQ Technology AB was a Swedish company that developed and licensed the UIQ software based on Symbian OS which was used in smartphone offerings from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, BenQ and Arima. They were based in the Soft Center Science & Research Park in Ronneby, Sweden, and at the time of its closure in 2009 was jointly owned by Motorola and Sony Ericsson.
Carbide.c++ is a software development tool for C++ development on Symbian OS. It is used to develop phones that use the OS, as well as applications that run on those phones. It is based on the Eclipse IDE platform enhanced with extra plug-ins to support Symbian OS development. The product is provided by the Symbian Foundation under an open source model. In April 2009, Nokia transferred Carbide.c++ and many other software developer tools to the Symbian Foundation. Members of the Symbian community now manage and contribute code to the Carbide.c++ product.
Opera Mobile is a mobile web browser for smartphones, tablets and PDAs developed by Opera.
Nokia E90 Communicator is a high-end 3G mobile phone from Nokia, the fifth generation and final Communicator, also part of the Eseries. It was announced on 11 February 2007 at the 3GSM show in Barcelona. It succeeded the Nokia 9500 Communicator as the company's flagship business-oriented device. Its clamshell form and design are reminiscent of older palmtop computers.
A mobile operating system is an operating system used for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical/mobile laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on them are generally not considered mobile, as they were originally designed for desktop computers that historically did not have or need specific mobile features. This line distinguishing mobile and other forms has become blurred in recent years, due to the fact that newer devices have become smaller and more mobile unlike hardware of the past. Key notabilities blurring this line are the introduction of tablet computers, light laptops, and the hybridization of the two in 2-in-1 PCs.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a smartphone part of the XpressMusic line, announced by Nokia on 2 October 2008 in London and started shipping in November of that year. Code-named "Tube", it was the first touchscreen-equipped S60 device by Nokia – essentially it was the first device to run Symbian^1, also known as S60 5th Edition, the touch-specific S60-based platform created by the Symbian Foundation. The touchscreen features tactile feedback.
The Ericsson R380 is a GSM Smartphone developed by Ericsson Mobile Communications. It combines the functions of a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA), and was introduced at CEBIT on 1999/2/18.
The Nokia N97 is a high-end smartphone introduced on 2 December 2008 by telecommunications manufacturer Nokia as part of its Nseries and released in June 2009 as the successor to the Nokia N96 phone. The N97 was Nokia's second S60-based touchscreen phone, after the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The device featured slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and ran on the Symbian v9.4 operating system. Its design took cues from the Nokia N79. A smaller and lower-cost variant, the Nokia N97 mini, was later released.
The Sony Ericsson Satio (U1) is a smartphone, announced by Sony Ericsson at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on 15 February 2009 as the Idou. It was released on 7 October 2009 in the UK in 3 colour schemes: Black, Silver and Bordeaux (Red).
Symbian was a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, at a time when smartphones were in limited use, when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably less popular in North America.
This is a list of devices that run on the Symbian platform mobile operating system, including their proprietary predecessors running on Symbian OS and EPOC.
The Nokia 603 is an entry-level Symbian Belle smartphone by Nokia. It was announced on 13 October 2011. It ships with the Symbian Belle OS. Later with the release of Nokia 808 PureView, an update of Belle Feature Pack 2 was released for the phone. Nokia 603 is a low-cost device featuring a 3.5-inch ClearBlack display, 1.0 GHz processor, and NFC.
Symbian Belle
Symbian Belle – the facts, the features and the pictures