25 March 2008

New Symbian's graphics architecture in Action!

Few moths ago at the Symboian Smartphone Show in London, Symbian Limited, developer and licensor of Symbian OS™, the market-leading operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones known as smartphones, has announced two ground-breaking technologies, ScreenPlay and FreeWay, to power the future of mobile computing.

The newly announced technologies offer dramatic enhancements in the vital areas of graphics and connectivity, which are essential in driving the growth and reach of smartphones.

Responding to the increased demands of convergence, Symbian has introduced new visionary technologies that give the industry the power to create devices that can handle and store large amounts of data, provide a responsive, emotionally engaging user experience, and deliver super-fast networking within today's power constraints.

ScreenPlay is the new graphics architecture in Symbian OS. Designed to power the richest visual experience available on a mobile phone to date, it gives users big screen effects in their pockets while ensuring long battery life. ScreenPlay is designed for mobile devices with user interfaces which integrate high definition video content, life-like games and animations.

It significantly enhances content presentation in versatile, yet simple new ways - by using transparency and overlays, for example. ScreenPlay offers high performance in a scalable fashion - working purely in software on mid-range devices and taking advantage of hardware acceleration when present on high-end devices. These enhancements are delivered without compromising the device's battery power efficiency.

This new technology is further enhanced with Symbian's recently announced support for Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) on Symbian OS, offering 'performance on demand' to maximize battery life and multimedia user experience on future converged mobile devices with multi-processor chipsets.

Nokia "Nokia's announcement of the S60 UI Acceleration Toolkit on Symbian OS complements ScreenPlay's offering by enabling the creation of impressive applications and graphical effects to deliver an attractive and compelling user experience," said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President, Nokia, in his keynote address at the Smartphone Show in London. "Symbian and Nokia continue to collaborate closely in developing S60 and Symbian OS, the market leading software platform for smartphones."

UIQ Technology "UIQ believes Symbian's ScreenPlay - enabling rich graphics and powerful content presentation - and FreeWay - a high speed application download enabler - are key to the future of mobile computing," said Johan Sandberg, CEO, UIQ Technology. "UIQ strongly supports Symbian's two new technologies which will further support our continuous work in enhancing the user experience and commitment to helping our customers differentiate their products. Both FreeWay and ScreenPlay will be adapted into future releases of UIQ."

Nigel Clifford continued, "After years of speculation within the industry, we can now see the effect of convergence playing out before us - it is changing the way we work, play, interact and live. Symbian's ScreenPlay, FreeWay, and Symmetric Multi Processing support have been designed to facilitate this lifestyle and power the future of mobile computing. When you see these new technologies in action, you'll realize they are in a league of their own."

Symbian has already started to deliver ScreenPlay and FreeWay to its customers and will further evolve the technologies in future releases of Symbian OS.