Lee Williams, Chief Executive Officer of the Symbian Foundation has confirmed that Symbian, the mobile operating system that powers many smartphones has gone open source.
As for the rationale for going open source, all companies need to evolve their product or risk the possibility of becoming stagnant. As a proprietary OS, Symbian had a tall order to fill which is even more of a concern considering the strengths of Google Android. It’s for this reason that the foundation may have elected to go open source believing that employing third party software developers will result in a better operating system and third party applications.
With this new development, Symbian is also looking to expand and Williams sees a future perhaps some one to two years down the road when we may see tablets and netbooks powered by the Symbian OS.
Williams states “It’s very likely that, in the next year or two, you would see such a product hit the marketplace. A lot of companies are experimenting with PDA-tablet-style form factors, also for stereo systems, and internet-connected devices running low power on primarily ARM architecture.”
The move to tablet PCs and netbooks will mean that the Symbian operating system will need to be hardware independent, something that the Wild Ducks project is involved with on the smartphone side, not to mention that Symbian has also been successfully ported to an Intel Atom processor based platform.
Via: Liliputing, Maximum PC
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