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Year: 1998

From the history of Symbian OS

The Symbian operating system was not originally developed by Nokia. The company first experimented with GEOS, a system introduced in the Nokia 9000 Communicator and further developed in its successor, the Nokia

  1. However, in the late 1990s, Psion and its EPOC operating system, which was also licensed to other companies such as Ericsson, successfully entered the market. In 1998, Psion split into hardware and software divisions, with Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola entering into a joint venture, and EPOC was renamed Symbian OS from its Release 6 onwards. All three companies wanted to use Symbian as the basis for their smartphones, with Symbian serving only as the core and each company developing its own graphical interface, thereby differentiating their products from one another.

The first phone with Symbian was the Nokia 9210 in the summer of 2001, and only two graphical interfaces, Series 60 (later S60) for smaller Nokia phones and Series 80 for communicators, gained practical widespread use, while Ericsson’s UIQ and Nokia’s Series 90 remained on the sidelines.

However, Symbian’s development was not particularly rapid. New features were added slowly, along with support for other technologies such as WiFi and GPS. At the end of 2008, Nokia bought all shares in Symbian in order to accelerate its development, and in 2009 it transferred its development to the Symbian Foundation, However, the desired acceleration and interesting, sharp versions of the system that could at least partially compete with the then-dominant iOS and Android did not come until 2011, when Symbian Anna versions appeared on the market. Symbian Belle, which was renamed Nokia Belle, is also set to appear in early 2012 – incidentally, Nokia enjoyed renaming at the turn of the decade, and for the sake of brevity, I will omit many of these vicissitudes.

Since April 2011, Symbian has been gradually transitioning to a shared code license, which should not be confused with open-source code. The company’s partners have access to the system’s source code and, upon agreement, can contribute to it.

Neither Microsoft nor Palm was able to stop the triumphant march of the Symbian system – both were left picking up the scraps, where there was always someone extravagant enough to experiment outside the main Symbian stream. Palm was hampered by the obscure underinvestment of a company that changed owners until they were replaced for good and merged into HP, while Microsoft was hampered by its headlong rush to transfer Windows control from 15-inch monitors to poor-quality mobile displays.

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