'Symbian is now more "open" than Android'

08 February 2010

Symbian now a free and open source

The gloves are off, folks. The groups supporting the Symbian operating system have obviously recognised the very real threat posed by Google's Android operating system and have decided to do something about it, by making the Symbian OS completely free and open source.

But that's not all, Symbian Foundation has declared that the Symbian OS is far more 'open' than its Android competitor which, it declares, is not as open as Google likes to make out. 'About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary,' said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. He added: 'Anyone can influence (the Symbian) roadmap or contribute to new features.'

There are 108 software packages featuring the Symbian OS source code, which you can examine and download here. A Symbian SDK is also available as well as a Product Developer Kit that are both compatible with Symbian^3 which will be 'feature complete' by the end of the quarter one this year.

Expect to see the first Symbian^3 phones by the second half of this year and the first Symbian^4 phones by the beginning of 2011.

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