Several decades ago the world was unfamiliar with such words as "cellular" or "mobile" phones. Now there is hardly a corner on earth where you can be sure not to hear known-to-all peeping. Having flooded the markets, mobile phones are supposed to be gradually updated to become more and more advanced and sophisticated. Mobile and portable, they should still combine modern technologies with the simplicity of use. This idea was perfectly incarnated in Symbian operating system - the world standard of OS for smartphones.
The advantages of the new system are hard to overestimate. The producers have reached their aim: they created a compact operating system for a compact device. Now it is easy to be at the top of the IT world - laptops, notebooks and OSs with their low reliability, inconvenience and demand for always lacking disk space have receded into the background. A new solution was required - and Symbian Company took the prize.
About 7 years ago Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion created a private and independent Symbian Company. The year 2000 was their triumph: Sony and Sanyo brought out the first smartphone based on the Symbian operating system in the market. Now smartphone models using this OS are counted in tens and this is not the end.
The main advantage of the system is that it is rather standard, flexible and scalable to be used in most of the mobile phones presented in the market nowadays. Either used by professionals or amateurs it gives the best fit. Moreover, it is possible to talk about global cell phone net cooperation due to the openness of Symbian operating system. Supporting almost all standards of cell phone communication (such as GSM/EGSM, GPRS, HSCSD, CDMA) Symbian is characterized by multitasking, compactness and efficient productivity. The producers provide the user with a full set of organizational, office and communication applications. All applications have common features such as:
- Extremely convenient UI
- Standard control elements (toolbars and toolbands);
- Keyboard or stylus steering;
- Possibility of image scalability;
- Possibility of printing;
- Data exchange.
As any product Symbian OS has several competitors. First to mention is Microsoft Windows CE (which is actually a cut down version of Microsoft OS for PCs). The problems, therefore, are the same: constantly increasing "demand of disk space" and instability. The same could be said about Linux attempt to produce a mobile OS - it is nothing but transfer of the full versioned OS to the small size of a smartphone. PalmOS appears to be a more serious rival though this OS was destined for organizers. Moreover, the speed of technology development leaves much to be desired - that is why the lag is inevitable.
The chase is supposed to be captivating: it is hard to predict who is going to be the leader. Symbian has a fair chance: back in 1999 it was given a status of "The best company with great potential"...