In a recent 'report' ARCchart said that Nokia may be thinking about moving to Linux as the base OS for Series 60 and they may therefore be about to dump Symbian. Rafe thinks that they are off their trolley...
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/viewarticle.php?id=187
Rafe wrote:From release 6 onwards it has been designed with mobile telephony at the heart of the OS.
I think that should actually be 'from release 1 onwards'.
Nevertheless, good article!
Good article, another mistake in the report is that it states that Nokia are the only Handset vendor to have produced a UI. This is incorrect as Fujitsu create the FOMA UI used on NTT DOCOMO phones.
ER5 was the last of the (Psion) EPOC OS's and Symbian OS v6.x was the first OS designed for Telephony.
Mr_Sparkle99 wrote:ER5 was the last of the (Psion) EPOC OS's and Symbian OS v6.x was the first OS designed for Telephony.
I know this is a quite 'academic' discussion and irrelevant to most, but based on various statements at the time, e.g. DP, CD etc (and see also Martin Tasker's introduction), ER1 (i.e. "Symbian OS v1"😉 *was* designed with Telephony in mind.
It just so happened that the hardware was way behind the software.
For the historical record, the ER5 machines E/// R380 and the GPRS version of netPad were the first EPOC/Symbian machines with some kind of telephony.
(Sorry, correction, the 9210 was actually out before the GPRS version of netPad, but the netPad's on ER5)
Martin,
Yes you are quite right about EPOC and the design considerations. However it was not really until 6 that telephony became the rasion d'etre (and even that's arguable). Trying to explain to someone who hasn't followed EPOC developments closely this is rather difficult (which is why I said 6).
A more important consideration is it was a mobile OS... in reality some of the desirable telephony fnction (such as single chip) didn't come in till release 8.
Rafe
Sure, I see your point, AAS started as AllAboutER6, so I guess in a sense the world as we know it commenced with release 6...what was before it is archeology...
But if we go out and say that one of Symbian's advantage over Linux is that it was designed from 'day one' with telephony in mind and then in the next sentence say that 'day one' commenced with release 6; we are sort of speaking against ourselves.
The storyline is limping, unless we recognise that already release 1 was designed with telephony in mind; more and more telephony features were added going forward. Multithreading in ER1, integrated contacts engine in ER3, integrated messaging framework in ER4, ETel (telephony framework) in ER5, Unicode and multi-UI support in ER6/v6, Bluetooth in v6.1 etc etc. In other words a continuous line of telephony features from the outset all the way up to release 8 and 9.
I agree on the release 8 of course. In comparison, the jump from release 5 to release 6 was principally just expoiting and refining already inherent features like unicode and multi-UI support, whereas release 8 has introduced something entirely new and is more ultimate 'telephony' than any predecessor.