Sunday, November 14, 2010

Nokia: All Symbian Phones to Taste Future OS Upgrades

At Microsoft's TechEd Europe 2010 conference in Berlin this week, Softpedia's Marius Oiaga had the chance to sit down a few minutes with representatives from Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia and learned a few details on the company's plans for the future when the Symbian OS is involved.

According to the company, the plans is to make the same experience available for all users of a Symbian device, without leaving any of them aside, in line with what it announced not too long ago regarding the future numbering of its OS versions.

At the same time, the company notes that this move is set to simplify things for developers too, who will be able to target more users at the same time with their applications.


“In the past we had mentioned Symbian^3 and Symbian^4, but now we have simplified it, and we have simplified the development process for app builders as well, and the platform is called the Symbian OS,” Dinesh Subramaniam Senior Manager Communications.

“There won't be Symbian^3 or Symbian^4, so there will be no binary breaks from here on,” he continues.

Basically, this means that any handset would be compatible with the newly released flavors of the Symbian OS, as long as the hardware inside it supports the new software solution.

“When we are ready to provide a better and upgraded user experience for consumers, we will announce it, and they will be able to download it and upgrade their software. This is similar to any other platform on the market,” Dinesh Subramaniam continued.

However, just as with the other mobile operating systems out there, users won't be able to update their devices indefinitely.

“After a while, let's say two or three years, the chipset won't support anymore upgrades and you'll have to get a new phone. You can not keep upgrading the same old one over and over again,” he stated.

“You'll need a new chipset, with the latest software in place, which will be upgradeable as well for a certain period of time.”

As stated above, this is great news for developers too, especially since Nokia announced not too long ago that it adopted Qt as the only development framework for its Symbian and MeeGo platforms, offering them the possibility to build applications that would work on more devices at the same time.

The company wouldn't talk MeeGo just yet, saying that it plans on announcing whatever would be to announce on it when the time comes. However, previous reports suggested that that first MeeGo device from the company would land in early 2011.

When asked whether we might see a Nokia phone running under an OS other than Symbian or MeeGo, Dinesh Subramaniam answered simply: No.

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