By Phil March
Numonyx Software Product Manager
The Symbian* operating system is one of the most commonly used smartphone operating systems in the wireless market. Despite market share losses over the last year, Symbian still has a market share of over 40 percent in the smartphone market segment, having served companies like Nokia, Sharp and many others. Nokia is now looking to expand Symbian’s use by making the operating system open source.
Continuing our commitment to our customers and the potentially expanding base of Symbian users, Numonyx offers dependable support for Symbian, and the Numonyx® NAND Flash Translation Layer (NFTL) has been fully validated on Symbian 9.4.
The Symbian OS descended from the Psion EPOC* OS. In 2008, Nokia acquired Symbian and proceeded to “spin out” the organization and reestablish it as a legal and separate business entity. Nokia then chose to make the Symbian OS open source, similar to the way Linux is open source. The benefits would be to make the OS more accessible to users (no expensive license agreement, just membership dues), as well as make it easy for the development community at large to contribute to its development.
The current open source version of Symbian is made up of contributions from Nokia, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson. This open source platform is governed under the Eclipse Public License.
Symbian was established as a separate business entity called the Symbian Foundation in April, 2009. The Symbian Foundation has since been bringing on a number of business development and marketing individuals for the purpose of raising visibility and making it easier to both use and contribute to the now open source operating system.
Based on the strategic importance thereof, Numonyx became a full-fledged member of the Symbian Foundation in September. This membership entitles Numonyx to all access privileges therein, including source code, contributions of code by other members and sharing of communications to/from the open source community.
Currently, the Numonyx® NAND Flash Translation Layer (NFTL) software supports Symbian. In addition, Samsung XSR* has also been validated on Numonyx® OneNAND™-compatible devices while running under Symbian.
Numonyx is keeping a close eye on the Symbian market to be ready to assist customers that adopt Symbian. Numonyx is enabling Numonyx® SLC and Numonyx® OneNAND™-compatible devices on Symbian using Numonyx NFTL.
On the Symbian Foundation side, the latest platform, labeled S^2, is expected to be released later this year.
The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License (EPL). This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments. In addition, the EPL allows members, such as Numonyx, to both develop on the Symbian platform and contribute code to the open source community.
To learn more about the Symbian support provided by Numonyx, contact your Numonyx representative for more information. For more information about Symbian and the Symbian Foundation, visit www.symbian.org.
*OneNAND™ is a trademark of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.