NJz Home: Symbian S60 Platform

Symbian OS is an operating system designed for mobile devices, with associated libraries, user interface frameworks and reference implementations of common tools, produced by Symbian Ltd. It is a descendant of Psion's EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors.

On 24 June 1998, Symbian Ltd. was formed as a partnership between Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion, to exploit the convergence between PDAs and mobile phones. Symbian was previously owned by Nokia (56.3%), Ericsson (15.6%), Sony Ericsson (13.1%), Panasonic (10.5%) and Samsung (4.5%). Ten years to the day later, on 24 June 2008, Nokia announced that they intended to acquire all shares that they did not already own. The acquisition was of €264 million, or $410 million.

On 24 June 2008 the Symbian Foundation was announced with the aim to "provide royalty-free software and accelerate innovation".

S60 Platform

The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. S60 is currently amongst the leading smartphone platforms in the world. It is developed primarily by Nokia and licensed by them to other manufacturers including Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic and Samsung

S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, PIM tools, and Helix-based multimedia players. It is intended to power fully-featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones.

The S60 software is a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, Python and Adobe Flash. An important feature of S60 phones is that they allow new applications to be installed after purchase. Unlike a standard desktop platform, however, the built-in apps are rarely upgraded by the vendor beyond bug fixes. New features are only added to phones while they are being developed rather than after public release.

Editions of S60

There have been four major releases of S60: "Series 60" (2001), "Series 60 Second Edition" (2003), "Series 60 3rd Edition" (2005) and "S60 5th Edition" (2008).

In S60 1st Edition, the devices' display resolution was fixed to 176x208. Since 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3, S60 supports multiple resolutions, i.e. Basic (176x208), and Double (352x416). Nokia N90 was the first S60 device to support a higher resolution (352x416). Some devices, however, have non-standard resolutions, like the Siemens SX1, with 176x220. Nokia 5500 Sport has a 208x208 screen resolution, and the Nokia E90 with its wide 800x352 inner display.

It is noteworthy that software written for S60 1st Edition (S60v1) or 2nd Edition (S60v2) is not binary-compatible with S60 3rd Edition (S60v3), because it uses a new, hardened version of Symbian OS (v9.1), which has mandatory code signing. In S60v3, a user can't just install any program, unless it has a certificate from a registered developer, or the user disables that feature.

In 2006, a "Designed for S60 Devices" logo program for developers was launched. The logotype can be used with conforming programs (Symbian or Java).

In 2007, an accreditation scheme that tests the ability of developers to use S60 effectively was launched. The scheme is run by Majinate, who also run the Accredited Symbian Developer scheme. The accreditation requires developers to pass two on-line exams: one in Symbian OS, the other in S60. This leads to recognition as an "Accredited S60 Developer".

In October 2008, S60 5th Edition was launched. (Nokia decided to move from 3rd Edition directly to 5th Edition "as a polite gesture to Asian customers" because the number four means bad luck in some Asian cultures.) The major feature of 5th Edition is support for high-resolution 640x360 touchscreens; before 5th Edition, all S60 devices had a button-based user interface. S60 5th Edition also integrates standard C/C++ APIs and includes Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 with S60-specific ActionScript extensions that give Flash Lite developers access to phone features like contacts, text messaging, sensors and device location information (GPS).

S60 Devices

S60 1st Edition

Nokia 7650

Nokia N-Gage, Nokia N-Gage QD

Nokia 3660, 3620, 3600, 3650

Siemens SX1