There has been a lot of discussion about the potential of Symbian once combined with S60 and completely unleashed. The fancies of the wildest and most pragmatic imaginations are most likely to be limited not by technical limitations, but by business realities.
A few of the bright and capable guys in the SOSCO (S60 on Symbian Customer Operations) team have Symbian compiling via GCC and now running on an off the shelf Atom based motherboard from Intel. It would be most interesting to see what level of interest we can generate in this port, especially if that includes some major business partners willing to come in and invest in the development of a product solution, and one that enables some differentiators to come to market for consumers.
Let’s not replicate the PC, Wintel, Netbook model, but instead really showcase the power of our code base, and an ecosystem of highly skilled providers of mobile technology.
The first image shows an S60 active idle screen. The second is a shot of the gear, off the shelf atom board in a vanilla bookshelf pc case. The third shot is a standard OpenGL demo running on the platform port. I was most impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers, and could only smile when we were able to quickly use a baseband modem port to make a call.
// Lee
April 16, 2009 at 2:43 PM
Symbian being an embedded OS since the beginning (Where is my Psion??), porting it to less limited hardware will definitely unleash more power while still keeping the benefit of the embedded OS.
When are we gonna see the first ATM on Symbian?
Or even a cash register, or a home entertainment system?
April 16, 2009 at 2:48 PM
That sounds very good for Symbian.
Probably, with more powerful hardware, the Foundation/Nokia will finally show the guts to get rid of AVKON/S60 and… develop a proper new Framework on the top of Symbian.
That would be super!
April 16, 2009 at 3:03 PM
to detronizator;
yeah that is happening and is called Qt.
April 16, 2009 at 4:02 PM
@mr mr: I hope u are a Nokia/Symbian Foundation employ. This would mean that the news is concrete
Of course I know about QT for S60, but so far I didn’t get clearly if it’s just “another framework”… or something that is going to substitute S60 completelly. I hope the latter.
April 16, 2009 at 5:03 PM
[...] Más información | Symbian. [...]
April 16, 2009 at 5:11 PM
[...] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments [...]
April 16, 2009 at 5:12 PM
Finally, somebody makes sense, this is interesting to me as the Amiga port to QNX! Keep it up… and if this code is available for beta testing…please let me know. I might try it out.
April 16, 2009 at 5:46 PM
If I understand correctly, they have ported it to x86 hardware? If so that would be really interesting.
April 16, 2009 at 6:16 PM
Lee,
I understand that it is your job to push Symbian.
However, even the thought of the work required to put Symbian/S60 on top of something else than a phone makes me shiver.
Making an OS port to another hw is relatively simple task. Even putting the UI running is quite easy. The difficult part comes after that. None of the upper layers (e.g. S60) was designed to be portable. There are huge amount of work needed to simply make UI scale to bigger screens. Almost all of the applications would need a rewrite. And after that, lets be honest, nobody would want to use S60 applications on a non-phone device.
For years and years, OEM’s have struggled to simply put a phones out based on Symbian/S60. Many (Siemens, Panasonic, Lenovo etc). of them gave up after one or two device.
Of course, I would love to be proved wrong. Let those Nokia guys at SOSCO enhance the demo and make the demo (including S60 applications) utilize the full screen. Lets see how well that will run. That would show more evidence of the platform quality than a quick-and-dirty port.
Br,
Karl
April 16, 2009 at 6:18 PM
x86 was done years ago in Symbian but wasn’t publically released. Grats on the OpenGL and modem bringup though.
April 16, 2009 at 6:38 PM
Hi Karl,
>None of the upper layers (e.g. S60) was designed to be portable.
It’s not black-and-white. The portability of these layers has improved a lot over the years, with each new release of S60.
>There are huge amount of work needed to simply make UI scale to bigger screens. Almost all of the applications would need a rewrite.
There are specific improvements regarding support for different screen sizes in the new Symbian Platform releases
>And after that, lets be honest, nobody would want to use S60 applications on a non-phone device.
I expect that people will create and use variants of these apps - taking advantage (in some cases) of the availability of their source code
>For years and years, OEM’s have struggled to simply put a phones out based on Symbian/S60. Many (Siemens, Panasonic, Lenovo etc). of them gave up after one or two device.
Yes, there were lots of struggles along the way. But there was a great deal of reflection, too, about the causes of these difficulties, and many improvements were made as result: improvements in the underlying platform, and in the professional services companies that can help OEMs to create devices based on the Symbian platform. So things are significantly easier nowadays!
// David W.
April 16, 2009 at 7:03 PM
I didn’t make this post in order to ‘push Symbian’ I am simply exposing the interesting work of a small and talented team that I had a chance to spend some time with earlier today.
The benefits of a mature mobile OS are more than skin deep. It might shock you what could be done with this port with the right level of dedication. You should imagine a scenario wherein I have a decent view of both what it takes and why some companies fail at being successful with this collection of software.
If you look at some of the major ingredients of success it includes technology, talent, investment levels, go to market effort, and strategic or business model alignment. I have yet to see this collection of code, err the technology cause failure with any effort.
Product initiatives fail for many reasons, and most of the time it has to do with the ingredients on the tail end of my list.
// Lee
April 16, 2009 at 7:40 PM
I believe its time to dump OLD Ui framework and build from scratch with QT on top of Symbian then it will rule the industry. After all Nokia must justify their investment in QT.
April 16, 2009 at 9:34 PM
what is that keyboard you are using? how much did it cost? could u send me a link to the keyboard?
April 16, 2009 at 10:29 PM
Have your guys tried running the port as a guest OS in a virtualisation environment e.g. VMware, VirtualBox, Xen? As you probably know, you can snapshot guest OS’s in some solutions. Easy to imagine an instantly starting emulator environment for app. developers…
April 16, 2009 at 10:30 PM
[...] Google Android isn’t the only mobile phone operating system capable of running on netbooks anymore. The folks behind the Symbian operating system (which incidentally, started out as the EPOC operating system that powered early Psion handheld computers a decade ago), recently ported Symbian to work with the Intel Atom processor. [...]
April 16, 2009 at 10:57 PM
[...] - News. Click here to visit the full article on the original website.Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on [...]
April 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM
[...] Via: Symbian Foundation [...]
April 17, 2009 at 12:59 AM
Wow, I take some time away from this blog, and folks (admittedly within Symbian/Nokia right now) have done some miraculous things with Symbian OS and S60. I wonder if this could potentially form a testing environment for developing Symbian OS/S60 apps, although I’m still hopeful for an ARM emulator too,
April 17, 2009 at 1:03 AM
[...] [SOURCE] [...]
April 17, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Come to think of it, I could see a lightweight OS like Symbian being useful for re-purposing older computing hardware, provided that developers were willing to develop or port “desktop-style” applications. Of course, given that we have Qt running on it (at least on ARM), anything is possible…
April 17, 2009 at 1:52 AM
Ow, very nice, now, i have use the Symbian in my Nokia and my netbook?, it´s a very cool.
April 17, 2009 at 6:41 AM
[...] according to an entry by Lee Williams on the Symbian organization’s blog, it appears that some intrepid engineers have managed to [...]
April 17, 2009 at 8:17 AM
Knowing the guys in SOSCO well, it demonstrates what a small team can do in a very short space of time, with a little Symbian knowledge. The SOSCO guys have specialised in integrating Symbian OS/S60 onto new hardware.
This port demonstrates what is possible with Symbian. Although netbooks should not be the focus of Symbian Foundation, the same reasoning that makes Symbian OS good for mobile (field hardened, and with wide ranging technology coverage), makes it good for other areas too.
Cheers,
Kevin
April 17, 2009 at 8:27 AM
Thats just a great! I’m impressed.
April 17, 2009 at 8:47 AM
I had seen Symbian on x86 before, but to have the whole thing running including S60 UI, 3D gfx and a modem is mighty impressive. Well done SOSCO!
I like tl’s suggestion of running this in a virtualisation environment. Doing that or even dual-booting right into Symbian OS on a PC could be an interesting alternative to emulators & simulators for developers.
April 17, 2009 at 10:50 AM
[...] Más información | Symbian. [...]
April 17, 2009 at 11:37 AM
Brilliant.
I would be interested in what doesn’t work. For instance, how much code exists as ARM assember? A lot of the default S60 software codecs are hand coded ARM.
I think Symbian had been using x86 ports internally for testing new versions of the kernel.
Is the OpenGL hardware or software?
Making a modem call is easy. The hard use case is video conferencing over 3G using a stereo bluetooth headset while a podcast is downloading over wifi. (Getting the s/w mature enough to even begin to cope with this sort of use case can take a year or so).
April 17, 2009 at 12:46 PM
It’s a big step into the independet hardware embedded systems.
How about the Wlan/lan connectivity by this demo, does wlan also work?
Pai
April 17, 2009 at 1:58 PM
Thanks everyone for the interest level.
As for requests for hires images and video…if I get a chance, then next time I will capture something of this nature. Otherwise, I would ask you to understand that being a demo photographer is not where I spend a lot of my time
In terms of what levels of additional functionality or drivers exist, I will say that there is a lot of additional work to do, and a development team would need to be applied to the effort to take it to the next level. Agreed, the hard part is ‘productizing’ and ensuring that there is a mature feature set that multi-tasks reliably.
Personally, the GCC compilation step seems the most relevant accomplishment, as it has benefits outside of those that would be most evident in a full Atom based product effort.
// Lee
April 17, 2009 at 3:02 PM
>>Personally, the GCC compilation step seems the most relevant accomplishment, as it has benefits outside of those that would be most evident in a full Atom based product effort.
Indeed, this is the big step. If the GCC port and tweaks are fed back into the code base (and is open source). Then that means that “bedroom” programmers can compile symbian kernel and middleware without having to shell out for the RVCT license (i.e open source build)
Lee. How long does it take to build the whole of Symbian/S60 codebase in GCC?
April 17, 2009 at 5:48 PM
Ok, this is interesting.
I’ve been out of the embedded software market for almost 20 years. (Outch!)
Just out of curiosity, how much power is in an Atom chip versus the chips currently used in the Nokia cells today?
I envision that there will be a convergence with the netbook and the high end cell phones… well you know where I’m going with this…
TIA!
-G
April 17, 2009 at 7:16 PM
Hmm, are you thinking about something like an extremely oversized Nokia Communicator, Ian?
April 17, 2009 at 10:56 PM
[...] Dimostrata la flessibilità del sistema operativo Symbian e la possibilità di poter essere utilizzato anche su altri dispositivi che non siano dei cellulari, adesso bisognerà vedere se le aziende produttrici di dispositivi mobili che partecipano alla Foundation avranno intenzione di investire in questo senso e creare dei nuovi prodotti così da ampliare e variare l’offerta per il consumatore. Speriamo! (fonte: SymbianFoundationBlog) [...]
April 17, 2009 at 11:34 PM
The sound is good, but how about supporting software application? Is office application compatible?
April 18, 2009 at 1:03 AM
[...] Symbian on Intel’s Atom There has been a lot of discussion about the potential of Symbian once combined with S60 and completely unleashed. [...] [...]
April 18, 2009 at 1:22 AM
[...] Via Symbian. [...]
April 18, 2009 at 6:32 AM
Hmm.. any future port to Game Console? Watches? Multimedia Kiosk?
April 18, 2009 at 12:37 PM
what is that keyboard? does anyone know? Lee Williams, could you tell us?
April 18, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Hi Alex,
the keyboard looks like “KeySonic ACK-595, Mini Keyboard”.
http://www.promago.de/prod/Tastaturen/Keysonic/Tas+Tastatur%252c+KeySonic+ACK%252d595%252c+Mini+Keyboard+US%252dLayout.html
Regards
Pai
April 18, 2009 at 11:25 PM
omg! Pai, it is! thanks!
April 19, 2009 at 6:52 PM
I predicted this some 5 years ago. My friends laughed at me ; )