Symbian was specifically an open source operating system designed for smartphones. Owing to the fact that was an open source, therefore, the software developers had the privilege of developing software for the same. It offered multitasking features and also provided an enhanced memory protection.
Although the production and/or up gradation of Symbian has been discontinued now, it was the first operating system to have conquered the mobile market. The mobile manufacturers like Nokia and Sony incorporated the OS in their mobiles. Check out the Symbian OS in comparison with Android OS.
The very first development was of EPOC by Psion, which ran perfectly on ARM processors. It was developed by David Potter in 1980. Therefore, Symbian actually developed from EPOC32, which was developed by Psion.
Symbian was initially designed as a closed source Operating System by the company of the same name. The company was a joint venture of Psion and the mobile manufacturers Motorola, Ericsson and primarily Nokia. It was developed mainly for PDAs or personal digital assistants.
The Hierarchy Of The Advent Of Symbian
The first step was taken by Psion when it came up with the initial version of the operating system release with the 32-bit version.
◘ Next to this, in 1991, a new OS called EPOC 16 came into being. This was called as SIBO too. It followed a simple programming language called OPL and OVAL as the IDE. EPOC had released it for the series 3 devices.
◘ Next, EPOC released an upgraded version of the OS for series 5 devices in 1997, after a continuous hard work for more than three years. It used the initial iterations which were coded in the name of ‘Protea’.
◘ After two more years, when they were working diligently, they came up with EPOC release version 5, in 1999. Later it came to be known as Symbian version 5. The versions released during this period were Psion series 5mx, Psion Revo, series 7, Psion Netbook, Diamond Mako, to name a few.
◘ In the next year in 2000, Psion released the Ericsson R380. However, it came up with a major disadvantage. The software could not be installed in here. It supported Unicode and thus, the code name was given as ER5u.
◘ Then came the Symbian OS version 6 and 6.1. It was the first open source Symbian operating system. Nokia released it in 9210 communicators in 2001, which had a Bluetooth support with it. Around 2 million Nokia phones with Symbian OS v6 were released that year.
◘ After two more years, the version 7 was released. This was like a revolution and came with a lot of advantages. It had a number of user interfaces specific for each type of phone.UIQ for Sony Ericsson, series 80 for Nokia and few more for Japan too.
Consequently, after every one or two years, the other versions 8 and 9 came up with advanced features till 2004. In 2005, the version 9.1 was released; it had new security features. Subsequently, the corollaries of the version 9 were being rolled out every now and then with 9.5 being the last in the series.