Symbian FAQ, v2.0

What is Symbian?

Symbian is a joint venture between Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Matsushita, and Psion, with Nokia as one of the founding members. Symbian was established by leaders in the computing and mobile industries to enable the mass market of communicators and smart phones. Symbian owns and develops the Symbian operating system that is optimized for mobile terminals, such as communicators and smart phones.

What does Symbian OS enable?

• Small, feature-rich, mobile devices for a mass market
• Diversity of devices for consumers
• Faster time-to-market for platform vendors
• Open, standards-based platform for third-party application developers
• Excellent connectivity
• Advanced design
• Extensibility
• High-performance, 32-bit OS with pre-emptive multitasking
• Long battery life
• Wide industry support and commitment
• Applications that can be designed once and run on multiple devices
• Nokia Series 60 and communicator platforms are based on Symbian OS

Why choose Symbian OS as a development platform?

Because Symbian OS is written in C++, it is a fully object-oriented operating system. This contributes to its flexibility, efficiency,and ability to re-use segments of the code.

Clearly defined APIs allow the large developer community, including terminal vendors, to create applications that can be easily downloaded, installed, and run natively on the terminal Symbian OS.

Symbian C++ APIs enable extremely efficient multitasking and memory management. Processor-and memory-intensive operations such as context switching are minimized.

Symbian OS is primarily event driven rather than multithreaded, potentially saving several kilobytes of overhead per thread. The event-driven Symbian OS doesn't need any context switching and can have an overhead as low as a few tens of bytes.

How reliable is Symbian OS?

Symbian OS was developed so that user data would never be lost and the device running the OS would never need to be rebooted. Symbian OS provides all the tools necessary for developers to deliver on this vision, including:

• Preventing memory leaks with effective memory management;
• Releasing resources as soon as they are no longer needed;
• Handling out-of-memory errors properly through an effective error-handling framework.

What capabilities does Symbian OS provide?

There is no single Symbian OS. Instead, variations of the Symbian OS are tailored for different device categories. The capabilities of the Symbian OS depend on the device category for which it was tailored. Each variation is called a Device Family Reference Design, or DFRD.

What are DFRDs?

Device Family Reference Designs (DFRDs) are variations of Symbian OS tailored for different types of mobile information devices. Each DFRD specifies a set of features, including user interface and hardware configuration. There are three DFRDs - Crystal, Pearl, and Quartz.

What is Crystal?

Crystal is a DFRD tailored for feature-rich, Communicator-type devices. Hardware platforms are phones with a full (typically qwerty) keyboard and a relatively large, landscape-oriented (horizontal) display. Crystal devices are designed for business users who need a lot of information. The Nokia 9210 Communicator and Nokia 9290 Communicator belong to the Crystal product family.

What is Pearl?

Pearl is a DFRD for a Symbian smart phone. Hardware platforms typically look like standard cell phones ? with small displays and limited keyboards.

What is Quartz?

Quartz is a DFRD for a pen-based phone similar to the Palm PDAs. Hardware platforms do not include keyboards, and the relatively large displays are portrait-oriented (vertical). Quartz devices are designed for consumer users and are geared toward information gathering.

What is GT?

Generic Technology (GT) is the set of core technologies common to all the DFRDs. The telephony components, for example, are part of the generic technology and are therefore available in all DFRDs.

What is an SDK?

A Software Development Kit (SDK) is supplied to third-party software developers and used by them to create applications. Symbian and Nokia both offer SDKs for Symbian OS. The Nokia SDKs are optimized for Nokia devices such as the Nokia 9200 Communicator Series.

What Symbian platform products does Nokia offer?

The Nokia 9210 Communicator, Nokia 9290 Communicator, and Nokia 7650 all incorporate the Symbian OS. The Communicators offer Nokia implementations of the Crystal DFRD, while the Nokia 7650 uses the Pearl DFRD.

What SDKs does Nokia offer?

Symbian SDKs from Nokia are tailored to the DFRD they support.

The Nokia 9200 Communicator Series SDK for Symbian OS supports the Crystal-based Nokia 9210 Communicator and Nokia 9290 Communicator.

The Nokia Series 60 SDK for Symbian OS supports the Pearl-based Nokia 7650.

How much do these SDKs cost?

Symbian SDKs from Nokia may be obtained free of charge from Forum Nokia at www.forum.nokia.com.

How does one get started with Symbian OS?

To start on the road to Symbian development, developers should choose the DFRD that best supports the hardware platform suitable for the application they have in mind; then obtain the appropriate SDK from Forum Nokia at www.forum.nokia.com.

The next step is for them to choose the best technology for the application. They may develop applications in their choice of C++ or Java, or may find that the application is best supported by a browser-based implementation. For more information about choosing a development technology, developers should read the white paper Choosing the Best Technology for Series 60 Applications available at Forum Nokia.