The Symbian Foundation, which was formed after Nokia bought the final part of Symbian last year, has released road maps of its intended release schedule.
That's all well and good but the most interesting part of the announcement is that the foundation plans to release a new version of the OS every six months!
When Nokia bought the last part of Symbian last year is claimed that it would make the OS open source and this is still part of the strategy.
However, it's also revealed more wider reaching plans that relies on developing up to five different versions of the the Symbian operating system at any one time.
In a report posted by Computerworlduk, it seems that the Symbian Foundation has plans to release a new version of the operating system every six months. According to the report, the first release, which has the rather and user unfriendly name of Symbian^2, will be complete by the end of the year and will be based on S60 5.1. Apparently, the easy way to say the name is just to call it Symbian 2 and ignore the ^.
The next version of the OS, Symbian^3 will be released in the first half of 2010. If this all pans out then we can see devices sporting a brand new OS in our hands by the end of this year and a whole new OS to explore six months later.
Talking of the future plans, David Wood, executive vice president of research for Symbian. However, said at the launch 'The content of Symbian^4 'is much more open for debate.' Wood did say that 'features that will appear in Symbian^2 are set and most of the features for Symbian^3 are agreed on, but some changes could still happen'.
With major updates every six months, the Nokia Foundation has set itself a pretty stiff challenge but if it can keep to this schedule then we'll see Nokia devices have a quicker turn-around and new features being implemented at a quicker rate.
This will give Nokia a clear advantage over the likes of Microsoft and Apple who typically have a far slower update cycle. Here's looking to Symbian^2 and all the new features and services it'll support.
Via: Computerworlduk